00:00:02 John Daub: Good morning. Welcome to Tokyo. Unbelievably, this is Tokyo. This is a shukubo, which is a... Actually, it's a shrine, not a temple, but it's... It's a religious place where you can stay for. And with this amazing view, this is the morning. It seems like all of Tokyo is underneath a layer of fog today. But we're okay. We're above the rain. That's Tokyo down there. Well, and this is actually Tokyo here too.

00:00:33 John Daub: But the leaves have changed. We're at elevation. We're on the top. We're literally at the top of a mountain. And I'm going to take you inside the room and show you this really beautiful traditional place. Good morning, everybody. I'm here filming a main channel episode, so I don't have a lot of time. I gotta get out there and film some of the beauty of this place. But it's pretty crazy. I found out about this place about a year ago.

00:01:05 John Daub: It's Mount Mitake. This is like on the top of a mountain. You gotta take a cable car to get to the top here. The temperature today is relatively... It's cool, but it's not cold, you know. This is the cable cart. Let me pull this up here. You have to take this cable car, the Mitake Tozan Railway, which I believe is... Which rail line company is Keio. So you got to take this at the top, you can't drive a car.

00:01:35 John Daub: You can hike to the top, but you can't drive. And that's the great thing about this place. There's no cars up here. So everybody comes in by this cable car. And after you get from the cable car, you have to hike all the way to the hotel or the village. I made a little time lapse for you to share. You can check this out. This is the entire walk of Mitake. From the cable car station all the way to the village.

00:02:06 John Daub: It takes about 20 minutes. It goes downhill at first, and then you start going uphill fairly steeply right about here. And yeah, right here it's pretty steep. But when you get to the top and you can see there are a lot of people, mostly Japanese here. This is where I get to the Shukubo or the... I keep saying temple, but it's really a shrine. So it was pretty cool walk up here. And they said it was going to be rain on the...

00:02:38 John Daub: On the weather forecast. But I'm kind of pleasantly satisfied with the steam. It's really satisfying to see it just... It's starting to creep up now into the trees. Look at that. Soon it'll envelop all of this area, I think. So this is the last time I'm really going to see the autumn foliage. Probably for a little while, at least with this colors, before it moves away.

00:03:08 John Daub: The fog adds mood. It sure does, Jason. This is maybe one of the better rooms in the place. Some of the average rooms are a little bit smaller, but this has two places to sit outside, drink coffee, kind of take in the view. I like this. This place is Komodori Sanso. The link is in the description. It's quite popular. So what we have here is mama and son at the kotatsu. The kotatsu is the center of Japanese rooms in the winter, late fall, early spring. You can see it's got this red glow because there's... There's heat going on down there. There's Kanae's feet staying toasty warm. And it becomes the center of the Japanese house.

00:03:39 John Daub: Oh, look, they found... We bought this at the cable car station too. It's a model. The train goes up and down, so the cable car pulls its pulls one to the other. That's kind of cool. The beds are very comfortable. It's different, right? They weren't laid out like on a tatami. They're actual beds. And there's three of them. Leo had his own, which is kind of nice. But I like this. You're staying basically in an old traditional Japanese house. That's the feeling. You get it just by looking at the roof. Look at this. It's really beautiful and clean. We haven't turned on that TV at all. There's no reason to when you're out here, but it's nice to have it.

00:04:41 John Daub: Refrigerator, some mats to sit down on the floor. And we have our own private bath. I... I guess it's an onsen. I'm not sure. But it's kind of neat to have your own private bath. So if you have tattoos, you don't have to worry about it. But the public bath is kashikiri or private... Private or rental, so you have to reserve a time. So I don't think it's an issue. If you have tattoos, you can stay here because you schedule the time to go into the bath, and only you and your family get to use one of the two baths that are here.

00:05:20 John Daub: They're quite large. I'm gonna make this for the main channel video, but you'll see it. You'll see it there. But I thought it would be kind of neat to share the room and the experience of staying in a... A top of mountain. Let me show you the map really quickly. I don't think you guys can... You realize how amazing this place is until you see where we are. So Tokyo is one of Tokyo, Japan's 47 prefectures. You can see it's that... That box right there. There's the city on the right side and we're on the left in the zone. And you can see Tokyo's got urban area and it's got mountains to the... The west. And that's where we are right now. You see Okutama is going to come up here. So this is from Tachikawa, which is like the end end of that urban area. There's Okutama up there. And we're at Mitake, which is more in the center.

00:06:22 John Daub: It's pretty deep. I don't think it's... It's that high up, but it's... It seems like maybe like 1500 meters or so. Maybe more... Definitely higher than the Sky Tree. So we're... Now you understand we're literally on the top of a mountain. There's a village on the top of a mountain in Tokyo. It's just so amazing. And I'm trying to get this story kind of understanding today. How'd this happen? Why did they build the town?

00:06:53 John Daub: Most people aren't going to build their town... It almost looks hidden. Like you can't see it on a map because of all the other mountains around it. But when you come down there, there it is. There's a village up here. So I'm going to try to get the... The story and understand how this temple town, this town was built on the top of a mountain and why it's not easy to live up here. Some people live up here all the time. You got take that cable car you can... There's a road for locals, but you can see down on the river. That's where humanity is down there. It's a lot easier than being up here. But some of the views... I went hiking outside, the trails are pretty... Some of them are challenging, some of them are not. But getting around is definitely interesting. You see these... I think this is Sugi that these trees that are standing up so straight.

00:07:56 John Daub: It's really a nice way to take a look at a different way to look at the city of Tokyo. And again, this is in Tokyo. I think I did this as an Instagram reels yesterday. So you can see we found a waterfall which was about... It's only 30 minute... 30 or 40 minute hike from the Shukubo, the Japanese inn that we're at so very close by and you can go to this waterfall. There's a rock garden that's quite famous. A couple of lookout points. There's some restaurants. But the food here is really good. I filmed that from the main channel episode, so you get a chance to see the... Some of the food probably in an episode. I think this might not drop till next year because we're working with others on it. But you can see how the kotatsu is quite... It's a place where you stay warm in a cold Japanese house and becomes the center of the room, which is really cool.

00:08:59 John Daub: You want to say hello? Hi to everybody. What are you doing? What are you doing? Nice. Are you hungry? No. He's not that hungry. He feels shy after he says this. Hello. Hi. It's very... It's very peaceful. So I wanted to get out of Tokyo and I ended up staying in Tokyo. Sometimes a retreat or getting away, you end up not going as... As far as you thought, but also finding some sort of a paradise that is not as far as you thought.

00:09:31 John Daub: It's really interesting. And I would say like, of all the tourists that visit Tokyo, 99% of them will never find their way up here or to this side of Tokyo. Most people follow the guidebooks. They go out to, you know, and they're beautiful places. In Nagano, up and to Hoku, you're going down to Hiroshima, to Kyoto. But you can find culture and history right here in Tokyo. You don't even have to leave the prefecture.

00:10:02 John Daub: And with the Mount and with the... The islands that Tokyo has going out into the Pacific. There's just so much just right here that sometimes we take for granted. I think we do take for granted. And you can see the steam is really starting to come up now. Oh no, it looks like it's gone down. There's a light rain falling in the... In the woods around. Temperature is like typical October, even though it's November. It's like, I don't know, maybe 10 degrees, 50, 50 in the 50s Fahrenheit. It's relatively warm actually, when I think about it. You don't need a jacket yet. I'm okay with just a sweatshirt and a button down.

00:10:33 John Daub: But the food here and a shukubo, which is a Buddhist temple typically. I'm going to ask him about it because this is a Shinto shukubo. I'd never heard of that before. But the food is typically all vegetarian because in Buddhist cuisine you don't eat any meat. But here we had some fish... Spider web... We had some fish. We had some duck. I'm not sure. I think it was duck. It was a little bit different. And that's not a bad thing because I like to eat meat. And so this shukubo worked out pretty good for me. But typically at a Buddhist shukubo, there's no meat involved. So Shukubo... Stay tuned. I'm going to find out more about it right now.

00:11:38 John Daub: The Nightbot writes in here the temperature, but that's accurate for Tokyo city down there. We're up at elevation, so it's going to be probably 10 degrees colder than that Fahrenheit are probably like 49 to 55 somewhere in that range, but it's certainly colder. Cooler, I should say. And that's the main house. So we're kind of like... We enter in through this gate and we kind of come down all the way here to this very special place.

00:12:11 John Daub: This is certainly... This is maybe... This is certainly the best room. Let's just put it like that. This is the best room here. No wind for sure. Ronald, wait. If you listen, you can hear the birds too. Hold on. Hear the... You can hear the... The light rain as well, falling. I'm hoping that it stays like this for the rest of the trip because we got to go up to the Mitake Shrine and film up there. The thing is, we had to get permits for everything here for filming, so it should be... It should be a really good main channel episode.

00:12:46 John Daub: We drove here from Shinjuku. It took 90 minutes. 90 minutes from Tokyo. You can... Sorry, you can... You can drive here. I would recommend driving because a lot of places aren't as accessible by train. The populations in this area are a lot smaller, so there's not a lot of reason to have a lot of trains. But the Chuo Line does run out here going towards Okutama, I believe, but stops at Mitake and a couple of other stations. You could... You could literally walk from... From the station to here. There's not a lot of traffic, but a lot of people just take the bus to the cable car station and then get to the top and then you can hike around this area.

00:13:22 John Daub: This area is really good for... Yeah, it looks exact. Ronald, you're right. It's... This is essentially old Japan, and it feels it. But having a place to stay that's as beautiful and clean as this is really amazing.

00:13:54 John Daub: They have... Oh, Kanae. We're locked in. We're locked in. How do I open this door? Yeah, I'm locked in. I don't know. We can't get out. Who locked the door last night? It's off. The door is off. Oh, the door is off. I don't know. Probably me. I think you pushed last night. I better fix it. You drunk? No, I didn't drink. I had one glass of beer at the dinner. I don't drink that much. I did it mostly for the video so I could pour the beer and then I gave the beer to the... To the cameraman into the assistant, which is nice. I don't drink that much at all anymore.

00:14:29 John Daub: All right. Yeah. You got heaters in the room, so you're going to stay warm. Two of them over there. And then you got the kotatsu, and we got the hot bath. Check this. So if you're just joining us, we have a hot bath here. Actually, this is a hot bath waiting for us after our breakfast. We're going to reheat it a little bit and then take a quick bath before we get out of here.

00:15:04 John Daub: Yeah. This month's postcard. Thanks, Jason, for sharing the link. Is Kiyomizu-dera. This is a nice shot in autumn from, wow, many years ago. But that'll be this month's card. So there you go. Thanks for joining the postcard club.

00:15:38 John Daub: All right, guys. Everybody, I'll see you from another episode. Maybe we'll... We'll see you later on today, Matane. That's one way to do it. All right, bye, guys. If you have any questions, you can leave them down in the comments below. I'm always happy to see what you guys are up to. Hey, Ranjit. Hey, guys. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.