00:02:00 John Daub: Good morning and welcome to Okazaki Park. That's Okazaki Castle right there. And it's one of the places where I first came to Japan in 1998. I remember this place so well, basically because I lived across the street just over there. In this episode, I'm going to take you around this area, the castle and maybe down that alley and the canal and then into the front of the park where there's this really nice clock, which you're not going to be able to see open. You just got to come there on the hour as well as walk around a little bit and then towards the river, show you a little bit of this Okazaki, which is my cultural home, my first hometown in Japan. So it's got a lot of meaning to me. But I wanted to show you the castle area. It's really pretty here.

00:33:00 John Daub: They have a bunch of vending machines over there if you need a cold drink. But it is a chilly morning here in Okazaki. Okazaki is in Aichi, about 45 minutes away from Nagoya. And I've been here many times. I would go running in the morning and run through the park and it was really unique to have a castle across the street from my house. I would tell friends that nobody would believe me because back then we didn't have social media. We didn't have Instagram and YouTube and Facebook. And then all of a sudden, here I am again. And this is the first time I'm really live streaming the castle that was across the street from my house.

01:34:00 John Daub: I remember telling my parents, hey, I lived across the street from a castle. I don't think they really understood that until maybe now, because now they're seeing the images live. Oh, it's a pretty castle. It's closed right now. It opens up in a couple of hours. It is a chilly morning here in Okazaki. Let me see if I can show you the river here. That castle has no moat. There's some canals around here.

02:01:00 John Daub: I don't have a lot of time. I got a chance to meet Mike. If you guys are fans of the show, you probably saw some of the comments in the live chats. Mike, who lives here, he commented, "Will he be here this morning?" And he was. So I got a chance to talk with him. I just remember this lovely red bridge. It was the first time I saw a bridge like this before that arched over with this beautiful, stunning shuuro (red lacquer) color. I'd spend many times eating lunch bentos right there in the corner. There's a beautiful hanging garden over there. I think it's like wisteria. And in the spring, this is also just so beautiful underneath that canopy there.

02:50:00 John Daub: But Okazaki Castle is teeming with life. There's so many birds. You see these ducks just landed. There's a beautiful ginkgo tree in season right now. Stunning. You're going to see a bunch of really colorful trees with the light hitting it at the best time right now, coming from the side because it's seven in the morning. Good morning. I see Ranjit is here. How you doing? Let's get down here. I guess that O stands for Okazaki, although it would be in hiragana o.

03:34:00 John Daub: Here's where I am right now. I like to throw in these Google maps so you get a chance to see where I am. So in Okazaki, that's what the castle park looks like. It's not too big. There's a canal and I live on the other side of that and there's the castle down there. So it takes up a pretty major part of the city. I think it was rebuilt in the 1950s or 1982. It was renovated. So it's not an original castle. It was destroyed, I believe in the 19th century, but rebuilt when they got some money again. Although I lived across the street from it, I've never been inside. So I'm saving that maybe to do with my son Leo and maybe Kanae Daub, if she is into it. It is a chilly morning.

04:35:00 John Daub: All right. So bye-bye Okazaki Castle. I'll see you again soon. I guess this constitutes something of a moat that goes around there, but it's more designed in a hilltop castle style. And, I think it was 1455 or something like that. Wow. Look at this scene. You can hear the Meitetsu (Meitetsu line) making its way to Nagoya. It's really pretty. I hope that the signal stays strong for everybody here. Beautiful. 1080p HD. Oh, I see my apartment. Oh my goodness. My old apartment. What? Why did they paint it pink? Slice of daily life. I can't believe I lived here.

06:00:00 John Daub: It's like you can sit in that moment for a lot longer than three seconds. But one thing's for sure. That's where I lived across the street. And as I said, it was like a hundred meters away from the castle. Actually the apartment complex was called Castle Kosei, because this is Kosei-cho, the name of the town within Okazaki City. And it's an ugly pink building there. It wasn't pink when I lived there, but it's pink now. I think I lived on the end. You can't see it, but we'll walk past there. I took this bridge all the time to get into the park. So we're just going to kind of go around real quick.

06:52:00 John Daub: I used to be in high school cross country team track. I would run. And so when I got here, it was like I did that through college and then I would run along these canals here. It's a really beautiful place. The canals went on for such a long, long time without a traffic light, which is great. So I got a chance to run here in the morning back in 1998. You see little things. This is the Mikawa region. So they're very famous for the stonework in this area of Japan, Mikawa. And they also have very good fireworks. Some of the best fireworks are made here in Mikawa. Good industry.

07:39:00 John Daub: Oh, there's the Meitetsu going to Nagoya. They look like the Super Express bound for Shin-Nagoya. You know, Mike has been here since like the 1980s, right? Or did he say 91 or something? I can't remember, Mike. I'm sure I'll see him again. There's a couple of notes here when I lived in this area. Oh, that was scary. It's a fire truck. That was a loudspeaker right on my shoulder. You see, there's a fire truck right there. Wow. So this is the view that I had from my apartment. You see just the top of the castle. So I'd look outside my balcony and there was this castle. I was like, what? Good morning.

08:58:00 John Daub: On the outside of Okazaki. Okazaki was the first kanji that I learned as well. I started learning kanji. I learned kanji through the places that I visited, which is really, I think the way most people from abroad start learning it, unless you started at school. Because a lot of the signs weren't in English back when I came. So you had to learn the kanji. Oh my goodness me, this is an ugly, no offense. Okay. So I think it was the second floor at the end there. I believe, I can't remember. And I'll tell you this, it's, this place is haunted. I've only seen a ghost once in my life and it was here and it might've been just from lack of sleep or jet lag or whatever. But I think I've told the story before. Castle Kosei.

10:00:00 John Daub: Look like it's, see, this is what I'm talking about with an apato (apartment). The washing machine is outside. It was outside my door and this is the first place like, what? I got to do my laundry outside. Boy, that metal stairway has not aged well. It's super cheap. I had a little rickety bicycle as well. And across the ways there's a, in the park, there's a well. I remember walking through there and they said Tokugawa Ieyasu was born here and his first bath came from this well. I was like, wow, well, well, well. Oh, beautiful. I wonder what the rent is now. If anyone wanted to jump online, look for Castle Kosei. Probably find it. I bet it's not that much.

11:03:00 John Daub: I'm going to ask for your help, guys. I'm really curious. I couldn't find an image for it online. But one of my strongest memories, two things here. One, there was an ugly building, like a two-tower building was it was a building and they had these two ugly towers on the top of it. I think Meitetsu had an advertisement on the top of it. I can't remember for the life of me what it was, but it's no longer there. And there's my old apartment. And I was just sitting there and there was a love hotel near Naka Okazaki, which was a train line that would take you to Toyota City. And I was like, why would a love hotel be here? And that's when my Japanese friends first told me about love hotels.

11:46:00 John Daub: You guys don't know about them. There's these places in Japan where you can go for love and love hotels. Back in 2018, when there was overtourism kind of started and regular hotels at capacity, the government of Tokyo was asking people to go to the love hotels and utilize them as places to stay, which is a weird thing to say because you can't check in until like 10 p.m. sometimes and you can't leave the love hotel once you go in. It's like after the deed or you wake up, once you leave, then you're done. But the love hotel's purpose was because the houses were small and a lot of the parents lived with their extended family, like their grandparents. They couldn't do it in there, so they'd have to go to the love hotel. So that made a lot of sense when they told it to me like that. It wasn't just for kinky stuff. It was just sort of they had to. But there was a really ugly building right across the street there. So let's go see into the park. It's just really, really peaceful here.

12:46:00 John Daub: It's a wonderfully done Japanese walking, strolling park. And they've maintained it well over the years. So it's a wonderful place to go. They have a lot of sakura trees in here. And it is just stunning in end of March, beginning of April, they have food stands. That might be one of the best times to come. The other time is during the summer fireworks festival in August. All right, let's go up here. I think there's the noh theater. I don't know if it's still there. A lot of running. You can definitely run in the morning around Okazaki with no problems. Ginkgo leaves are really nice. The trees have turned pretty good. We'll have a little color left for a couple more weeks before winter really sets in.

14:01:00 John Daub: In Japan, most of it you probably don't see on the coast until December. All right, that takes you up to the castle. I think that's the noh theater. Oh, there's the clock. Let's go up here just for a minute. Old steps that the Tokugawa clan probably walked through. It was built by the Honda clan, which is funny because Toyota is just across there. City of Toyota, as I said yesterday. I had a friend, an English teacher who lived in Toyota. She didn't pay any local taxes because Toyota took care of everything, including the garbage disposal and the public services. Some more beautiful Mikawa stonework.

15:11:00 John Daub: I'm going to go up here. Thank you for the time, Connor. Wow, what's going on here? Some parasols. You can see this. I'll probably light these up at night. Bamboo with holes in them so they really illuminate well. It's the little details that make parks really special, I think. All right, here we are into the heart of the park. It has changed. That statue was there before. Okay, I haven't walked through here in 25 years.

15:58:00 John Daub: Yeah, that was there. It's a nice little water fountain with Tokugawa Ieyasu riding a type of horse. Yeah, it was across here where the condominium is, where that really ugly tower was. And then if you go down there, there's a Cibico (supermarket). I don't know if we have time to go all the way over there. This clock is also noteworthy. Namida, thank you. You finally caught a stream riding in here. They do have squirrels in Japan. They're not quite the same, though. A little bit smaller.

16:39:00 John Daub: This clock is really special. On the hour, the sides open up and put on kind of a kabuki-looking Japanese performance. I haven't seen it in years, but we're about nine minutes away. We're not going to get a chance to see it. But it was the first time I had seen a clock like that. That was really cool, made by Seiko, a Japanese company. And there it is. Noh theater. And I saw a performance in there once when I lived here. It's closed most of the time. But when it opened up, I think like once or twice a year, it's pretty special. Noh theater is not as exciting as kabuki, for example. It's kind of slow. It's basically a dude reading a book. So there's some acting, if I can remember. But it's a lot slower than kabuki if you compare the two theaters.

17:53:00 John Daub: That's the hollyhock, I believe, the symbol of the Tokugawa. Apparently there was some anime here because Roots of Kawaii or something. Because they're on the manhole covers. I used to come this way to walk to work. I'd walk past the clock. And then I'd walk through this gate. And there was that ugly tower across the street. Good morning. All right. Now I'm really close to this gate here. Let's walk through it. Wow. So your first week in Japan, you're going to work and you're walking through this thing to get there. It's just surreal.

19:03:00 John Daub: Now this is starting to remind me of a walk I did hundreds of times. Yeah. This is where that ugly building was. It's a shame. It was so tall you could see it all the way from the Shinkansen making its way to Nagoya. It's Okazaki Park it says right there. And you know the castle is not too big. You can just see the side of it right there. But this area on this side has changed a lot. And that's the new Okazaki. It was my final night here in Okazaki in 1999. And I taught the owner's son English. He was one of the students I had so I might be able to find him. But I'm kind of tracking down some of the students that I had back in 1998, 1999. A couple of them were like one or two years old. Some of them were seven or eight. So all different ages.

20:26:00 John Daub: I searched online and I used to walk in this direction. I would cross over. This is a new crosswalk. But I would cross over and go in that direction. But I looked online and I couldn't find the ramen shop that I used to eat at. So sadly my favorite ramen, the karamiso negi ramen from here is gone. I just remember he put up a mountain of negi (green onions). I was like what is this? I love it. And then I started eating there all the time. And the owner, he couldn't speak any English and I couldn't speak any Japanese at the time. And he'd see me. I'd come in and he'd look at me. He goes, you, karamiso negi ramen. And I go, yeah, karamiso negi ramen. It might have been the first Japanese words I learned.

21:07:00 John Daub: I'm not going to Nagoya today. I'm going to a lovely town, a neighboring town to Okazaki called Nishio. Maybe I'll do a live stream there as well. But Nishio is, there's an owner of a guesthouse that I want to meet. He went to my rival school. He went to the University of Michigan. Can't blame him. Sometimes you can't choose. But I went to Ohio State. And so that'll be pretty interesting despite what happened in the game last week. It was a disaster. Let's not talk about it. Nevertheless, I'm going to go over there. And he's done some amazing things. He's promoting his town. And I'd never heard of Nishio even though I live next to the town. But it's got so many attractions. It's famous for unagi (eel), for matcha. It's like, what? They got a lot of the stuff that Kyoto's got. And sake and all this other stuff. So I'm curious to see what his town is so special. Because he loves his town. He wants tourists to come there.

22:14:00 John Daub: And that's what I'm doing here. And that's what I'm going right now. So I got to make my way back to the river. But we're walking through Okazaki's city. This is along Route 1. Now, this road is pretty significant. Even though it doesn't look like it, to me, walking down it, I rode down this on a mamachari (one-speed bicycle). From Nihonbashi. And I rode with some five friends. Two of them quit en route because it was hard. To Kyoto on a bicycle, one-speed bicycle, for five days. And I went through here. This is Route 1. This road, if you go straight all the way, you get to Nihonbashi. This is the old Tokaido. Anyone who remembers, this is the Tokaido. Right now, we're walking on a road with a lot of cars. But it's hard for you to imagine, this is the main road going to Kyoto in the Edo period.

23:12:00 John Daub: Now, there's a nice shot of the Okazaki Grand Hotel. They have a beer garden in the summer up there. Really pretty with the lights. You can see Okazaki Castle. And Mike told me he had his wedding ceremony there. I said, well, that's a nice hotel in Okazaki for several decades until now. Now, there's a bunch of hotels. And a lot of new apartment complexes. These did not exist. Okazaki was not this tall. It was just a low city with that one ugly tower building. But it's a really nice place. I thought it was very sumiyasui (easy to live), easy to live here. And who knows? Maybe one day I do. Tokyo is nice. But I think I like a little space. I like driving. There's a lot more traffic here than where I'm used to.

24:16:00 John Daub: It's really special to get a chance to walk and share this with you guys. It's a little weird. Like, what? I'm starting to see stuff. I remember this crosswalk. It sounds weird, but it's all rusty now. There was a movie theater. And nobody ever went to it. Except for me. I watched a movie called Thin Red Line. Which is weird. I felt a little bit uncomfortable. Because it's the war between the US and Japan. So I'm sitting there. And it's like one of those sticky floor old type of theaters. You know, the general cinemas type of places. That building looks like they cleared out everything over there. Alright, let's go up the steps here. We gotta go around this bridge real quick. Let me know when it gets to 8 o'clock, will ya? 8 AM.

25:21:00 John Daub: Hey, Namita. Thank you. Really enjoyed the streams. But I live in Greece and rarely have a chance to watch live. Ah, thank you. Yeah, you know, I don't do too early live streams too early. So this is certainly a special live stream. Because I gotta get the camera out and get to work. Not too long from now. So from this overpass here, you get a chance to see a little bit better. This is the street that I worked on over there. Going over Route 1, which is the Tokaido. There's the castle where all the trees are over there. It's not too big. Man, I wish I had another 15-20 minutes. I'd walk down there. But I can already see the bank. And maybe from this corner I can see where I worked. There's Cibico. Yeah! Last time I was here was 2005. Again, I rode my bicycle through there. There's like a supermarket. It's 8 AM.

26:46:00 John Daub: So I worked on the... After that white building, there's another building at the intersection. Second light. And I worked at that intersection. The school's no longer there. But it was nice. I wasn't the greatest teacher at first. Everything was just so new. I was more focused on like, what the heck am I doing in Japan? Sometimes I still say that. I didn't hitchhike on this side. I always hitchhike on the Sea of Japan side. It's a little bit easier for that.

27:23:00 John Daub: Alright, guys. I hope that was interesting to you. I gotta get to work now. But if you have any questions or you want to make a comment about this beautiful city, Okazaki, I hope to be here again. Because this is where I started my last 26 years in Japan. I started in this city right here. This is kind of my hometown in a way. And it's kind of fun to walk around because you get a chance to see what a typical city in Japan is like. A lot of them kind of look the same. The signs all look the same. And Route 1's real busy, isn't it? You can hear a lot of traffic on the old Tokaido.

28:11:00 John Daub: Oh, that building. I remember that building. It's funny it's still here. Yeah, there was a cowboy bar. Mike remembered it too. There was a cowboy bar in here. Not this, like a couple of alleys back. And they used to do square dancing there. It was the most, it was the weirdest thing. You come to Japan and like that was still the time where you had like these vibes of Elvis and the Beach Boys and the old America. It still kind of was resounding back then. So you had some of these now old timers but weren't so old 25 years ago. One guy had like a bar restaurant where you could get kind of American food. I remember he had nachos. But there was also square dancing. I was like, what? Why? Sometimes you get these quirky things that pop up.

29:11:00 John Daub: That place is no longer there, unfortunately. It goes down in the memory of this live stream. It's probably not reported on the internet. It was here before the internet was really a thing. So a lot of this stuff just went unreported, you know. And now I'm reporting it right now. There was a cowboy bar in Okazaki. Not that far from the Otogawa (Otogawa River), which is where we are right now. All right, everybody. Beautiful day. I hope that you enjoy this live stream. Let me know in your comments below what you think. Don't forget to subscribe. And I'll see you in another live stream. Real soon, probably from Nishio. And I'm leaving to go back to Tokyo on Friday from Hamamatsu. See you. Look at that duck. Or is it a crow?