00:00:00 John Daub: Hey everybody, welcome to Tokyo Station. This is the Marunouchi side where the Shinkansen (bullet train) would take you to this destination, one of two that made the New York Times 52 places to go in 2025 list. It's kind of cool—for the last few years this has been coming out and been on Japan's radar because Japan has two of those 52 places around the world to go and visit, which is always a big deal. Yesterday I was on the Japanese news to talk about this. You can see there I am in the window as the Only in Japan producer talking about Toyama. And today I wanted to talk to you about this. This is a part of the job and the stuff that I do here in Japan. I talk about this also to the Japanese audience. This is kind of fun.

00:00:43 John Daub: Yesterday it was a live news TV program in another language so I'm always kind of nervous going into there. However, not so much here. I'm in front of Tokyo Station so if you are in the area do come and say hi. Now Toyama is kind of a famous place in Japan. We all know it. So when we saw this come on the list here, like we always say why Toyama? Like we could say Kyoto. We can understand maybe Tokyo and Kamakura and places that are nearby because we know them so well as being such amazing tourist attractions. But why Toyama?

00:01:16 John Daub: Two years ago it was Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture up in Tohoku, made the list as number two. It's not a ranking. This is just 52 places. It's not like number one is just luck of the draw I guess. It gets a lot of credit, but the New York Times does not do it as a ranking, although it might seem that way when you have a list with numbers on it. Morioka was number two in that list so it got a lot of buzz here in Japan. Morioka being on this list and I don't read the New York Times, but it created so much buzz and so much attention on media like all the other media as well as magazines and other YouTubers. Tourism to Morioka last year increased 30% and we think perhaps because of this list. There wasn't a lot of tourism in Morioka. It was a relatively unknown place, but it had these really unique attractions and garnered a pretty significant increase. So this list is pretty significant, at least it is right now.

00:02:17 John Daub: So when I looked at the list yesterday—actually, I think this is two days ago—I have a digital version of it. It makes me kind of curious. You're flipping through this list. It's worth taking a look at it. It's kind of fun just to flip through it. You got New Orleans, Indonesia, Delphi, and there's like Toyama. Like what? I paused here. You see this nice Kengo Kuma building here. Toyama has been doing a pretty good job of trying to make more attractions known to the rest of the world.

00:02:47 John Daub: Craig Mod who is a photographer for the New York Times and lives here in Japan, speaks fluent Japanese. He was interviewed on the TV show that I was on yesterday. Toyama. Two years ago I remember I was on the program, and then again yesterday I had a clip of him talking about why he picks these locations. And in here they also picked Osaka which was number 38 on this list, although it's not a ranking. The explanations why were pretty interesting. I'll talk about this as well. But Detroit was on the list, so it makes you kind of curious, doesn't it? Like is your town on the list? And why did they pick these certain places? But why they picked Toyama was really interesting to me.

00:03:25 John Daub: Now according to Craig Mod, who is one of the guys who picked this location, I kind of pulled up on his website here. He has a blog entry about this, and this is the famous squid from a few years ago using tax money to make this attraction to attract tourists. But that was in Noto Hanto which had the big earthquake. And then Toyama City of Toyama makes his pick of 52 places. It was placed at 30 this year's list. It was his place. Nobody picked it, put it there for any particular reason. I think it's worth reading the 2025 editorial. This year marks our 20th anniversary of publishing this list. Interesting. But why this year? Last year they had the Paris Olympics. They had the solar eclipse in North America. So they picked this based on what's going on this year, some big linchpins of the year.

00:04:14 John Daub: But the word of the summer last year was overtourism, and that was really interesting. We talked about this quite a bit, particularly on this channel. So they thought about this when they picked Toyama, and there's a lot of positive effects that came out of it. And then after the list of picking new places, putting places that you hadn't really heard about, there was a positive. But this one here was really interesting, the paragraph: "Can you at the very least do less harm?" I thought this was really interesting. And on this I think Craig Mod and I are really much on the same page.

00:05:01 John Daub: I do think that being on this list is really important for Toyama and for any prefecture because it's like free publicity of course. But Craig also I think understands the impact that such a list does have inside of Japan, and I do too. I introduced a capsule hotel about 10 years ago, like 2015, in Shinjuku. Nobody had really done a capsule hotel video on YouTube like thoroughly. And I got permission and access to film inside of there, and I introduced it as sort of a tourist attraction. They had, I don't know, it was like 25% tourists and 75% salarymen at the time. After the video which went super viral—I think it's got something like 8 or 9 million views—other YouTubers started to also show capsule hotels.

00:05:50 John Daub: The manager mentioned to me that he had a hard time adjusting because he didn't realize the impact that this video had, not just what I did but what other YouTubers would do. People brought luggage, and in capsule hotels you don't bring big suitcases. He had to make a luggage space for it. He had something but not for the amount of luggage. People were bringing kids to the capsule hotel. Capsule hotels are not supposed to be for kids, like could our families stay in a capsule next to each other? No, that's not what it was. So they've repurposed the capsule hotels, and since 2014, 2015 ideas like First Cabin and other places which are like ramped up or specialized capsule hotels for tourists mostly have popped up.

00:06:30 John Daub: And that's been kind of always in my mind when I introduce places that are new to everybody in Japan. Like there's a sort of a responsibility that if the place is not ready for a lot of tourists, you can cause more harm than good. So I'm trying to introduce more places that are off the beaten path, you know what I mean? The next episodes in Only in Japan the main channel will be there. But Toyama, I mean is it really off the beaten path? Just a few years ago I was there for the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route. I always get that messed up. But the pass here has very unique 20-meter, like 60-foot high walls or something like that.

00:07:19 John Daub: It's really unique to see this and it makes the bus look really weird because it's like yeah, the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route. It's open from June 1st, so it's not open now, but it's about 60 feet on average, but it makes the buses look like Matchbox cars. This is not the highest spot in there. I think this is maybe 10-15 meters high. There were much higher places there, but the buses look dwarfed by the walls. It's just such a unique sight. This brought a lot of tourists mostly from Singapore, Hong Kong, a lot of people from the Philippines, Thailand—places where there's no snow. I mean this might not be special to someone who's in Buffalo, New York for example, but it's certainly a unique tourist attraction for Japan.

00:08:08 John Daub: And this is what Toyama was mostly famous for—this one particular tourist attraction in the past. It was really hard to get there. There's the Alpine Route is really hard to get there because we did not have a Shinkansen until about 10 years ago when the Hokuriku Shinkansen opened up. Kanazawa, Toyama was on the stop. So it really opened up this as a tourist attraction. Now back then it wasn't really—Toyama was on the other side of Japan. It was off the beaten path. It was really hard to get there. So these tourist attractions—Hakuba is in Nagano and that's sort of in here. That's just on the other side of the mountains there.

00:08:44 John Daub: But Toyama City is this beautiful place that hugs the Sea of Japan and in the south the Southern Alps of Japan. It's got the sea and the mountains. They pretty much meet so that it has amazing water, delicious food, produce, fish, sushi. It's got so much good stuff. Here's where the Castle Park is. It's got castle ruins right there. The picture of the tram going by the castle's kind of famous—modern versus the ancient—and then there's the Southern Alps, right? This is some very high peaks that are melting in the spring and going into Toyama Bay there leading to really unique good botan ebi (sweet shrimp) for sushi. It's got some really good delicious fish because the nutrients going into the bay there leads to some of the best cuisine.

00:09:35 John Daub: Kanazawa is not that far away. But Craig also wrote that he connected Toyama with Noto which suffered that great earthquake that happened at the beginning of last year and it kind of connects it there. Toyama is sort of a gateway to the Noto Peninsula and hopefully when things get a little bit better, we're going to have more tourists go to Noto and see that big squid. Which everyone yelled at them and said no one's going to come and see this big squid. Now it's become sort of a symbol of tourism to Noto as they try to rebuild from the devastating earthquake from last year. The Glass Art Museum, I guess that's a Kengo Kuma building. So there's a lot of unique attractions in there.

00:10:13 John Daub: If you remember I also introduced the Starbucks in the park there. It was the world's most beautiful Starbucks in 2008 when Starbucks was like this thing. We're like if you go out of the countryside, there's not enough people to make Starbucks work. So who would want an expensive cup of coffee in the middle of a green area like this? So this particular Starbucks became quite famous worldwide for its location inside of a green park like a countryside location. Toyama doesn't have a huge urban population. I think it was the first Starbucks in Toyama at the time. So it garnered quite a bit of attention as the world's most beautiful Starbucks. I even went there, made an episode on it and it's still quite beautiful. You get to see the sunset with the big windows there. It's quite a different view than what you get in like New York City because Starbucks is quite famous for coffee you pick up on the go. You see businessmen, taxi, loud noises outside—you associate it differently with this particular one. And that's what kind of put Toyama on the map for me internationally in 2008.

00:11:16 John Daub: So what do you guys think about this list? I think it's pretty significant. It does make a big impact again. When you look back at Morioka up in the north of Tohoku being put on this list and seeing that it had a 30% increase in tourists going there, I think it does make a big difference. I'm not a fan of the New York Times—probably guys probably know that—but you know, there's politics and then there's everything else and that's kind of a big deal for the people of Toyama. And I'm super stoked for them. I think that whenever you get your hometown highlighted worldwide in a publication, that's kind of a pretty cool thing, right?

00:12:00 John Daub: The Nakameguro River Starbucks is now number one, I think. I'm not trying to promote the chain. I just think that they've done some pretty interesting stuff with tourism. So it does bring a number of people to places that they normally wouldn't go and you got to give them some credit.

00:12:25 John Daub: This month's postcard is pretty unique. This is onsen (hot spring) scene in Hirase in Fukushima up in the mountains there. My friend and I made a video on this about eight years ago and you can see this beautiful waterfall as we're soaking in a barrel. This is the postcard for this month. This will come out to you. I just got these in. I just went to the post office over there to pick up the stamps here. So here's the stamps. Check this one out. I'm kind of excited. If you do sign up the Postcard Club, you're going to get one of these stamps. You can see the Jigokudani snow monkeys there as well. So there's a little bit of Japanese culture in each one of these stamps here. You're going to get one of these 10 stamps on your postcard. If you join now, and I guess if you join this weekend, I can give you—if you're a new sign up for this weekend just for Saturday and Sunday—if you sign up, I will send you last month's postcard as well. So you'll get two for the price of one if you sign up for the Only in Japan Postcard Club.

00:13:22 John Daub: Thanks everybody. It's kind of cool and they're making it to Canada as well finally. Canada Post is up and running. So the postcards are getting there. I sent it from Tokyo here. So it's a Tokyo postmark on the stamp, which is kind of cool. If I went up to Fukushima, I would take it up there. Let's see what happens. These will go out on Monday I believe.

00:13:45 John Daub: You should upgrade Sean. The economy is getting pretty rough particularly in Canada. And we lost some Postcard Club members who were very polite about it and said they'll rejoin when the economy gets better, but I'm rooting for Canada to get better. It's kind of tough up there right now with elections coming pretty soon. I won't get into the politics of all that but economy is tough in a lot of places here and I get it. But I really do appreciate the support here and I hope I can make it up to Montreal again soon. See my friend Danny or Hawaii and see my friend Michael Sassano. Who's here? Aloha, Michael. Happy Saturday.

00:14:23 John Daub: Pick up an after you got it, brother. I'll get something from you and bring it down here. Check it out. They have a wedding going on here. The people taking the wedding pictures. It's kind of a famous place to go because you have the Imperial Palace over there where the Emperor lives. So my sister when she got her wedding pictures done, they hired me. I didn't get paid for it of course, but I took my camera out was able to snap their pictures in front of here. If you come in the morning in the summer, there's nobody here and the sun is just rising and it makes a pretty good picture, but it's always nice to see the bride and groom walking. It's chilly today too. So that bride is a pretty tough cookie. I don't know how the ladies do it when they dress up in these dresses. That's pretty special. But yeah, it's a little slice of Tokyo life here in Marunouchi.

00:15:44 John Daub: I'm guessing next year and you know with lists Japan is really obsessed with lists and the one thing that a lot of publications—I had to correct the Tokyo Weekender, which is a publication here in Japan. They were polite. They responded to my comment and said that they updated the poster reflected but the list is not a ranking. So number one is a nice position, but it's actually not a ranking—one place is not better than another. Detroit is in the top 52, but there's like reasons for it and it's not. What was interesting was that they are considering overtourism, right last year. We had too many people going to the same places—overtourism became such a big buzzword. Toyama is such a wide place that doesn't have a massive tourist industry yet. I think it was a good choice. It was a responsible choice.

00:16:32 John Daub: And again like going forward this year, I'll try to pick places that maybe you haven't heard about or other YouTubers aren't doing because I really do feel that there is a responsibility. Not just for me, but for other YouTubers not to show you the same places over and over again that you know about even though we can get lots of views, but also to slip in places that you don't know about because we do have to make a living off of this and I got to say thank you to my Patreon community because I do get a chance to not have to worry about if I get a million views on each video. I can more follow what they would want to know what you guys would want to see.

00:17:08 John Daub: So I went to a town. I don't know what's going to be on the list next year. Maybe Matsuyama because the Dogo Onsen renovation should be finished soon and Dogo Onsen is a thousand-year onsen with the building that looks like something from Spirited Away. It's a beautiful place with Matsuyama Castle being one of the top five in Japan up on a hill in the middle of the city that might be on the list next year. They seem to pick one place that's popular, one place. It's not Osaka because the Expo's there—I can understand why that's on there—but I understand why they picked Toyama because it's close to Noto Hanto, because they have a lot of really good attractions, because they could handle the tourists. And if you do go to Toyama, you really have to do your homework on why—there's a couple of things that I want to cover.

00:18:19 John Daub: You can see the buzz around Tokyo Station. People are dressed pretty warm right now. The temperature is getting pretty chilly. We got a ton of snow in the north and on the west side of Japan up into Hokuriku up in Niigata as well, Sea of Japan side. So you know, Tokyo we don't get a lot of snow. But when the snow does fall it becomes snow chaos. It's not quite as able to handle snow as other places in Japan.

00:18:48 John Daub: What do you guys think about this? I'm very curious about this. What do you think about the New York Times list? Do you think it matters? Do you think the politics of everything in the New York Times makes them irrelevant? I don't think they're irrelevant anymore. I got to be careful here. I don't think that the publications are irrelevant. I think that journalists might be biased in the political realm but I even when it comes to travel and entertainment. I'm curious to find out what you guys think because if you're living in the US for the last 26 years, you know a lot more than me with regards to that.

00:19:35 John Daub: But I do think that being on the list has proven—look at the sun shining between the Marunouchi building and the other building there on the Otemachi side. I do think that it makes a big difference and I have a feeling—two years ago they picked Morioka, last year they picked Yamaguchi. I don't know if that made a big impact. I think the big winner was Morioka. And this year they picked Toyama. And we're going to see if it does make a difference. I bet you that the Toyama, the Tateyama Kurobe Snow Wall is going to be quite busy.

00:20:03 John Daub: They also have a place—you know, Shirakawa-go is this village, this UNESCO World Heritage village that's so beautiful with those old Japanese houses, thatched roof houses. Toyama has a village like that that almost no international tourists know about yet. So this is going to be making the rounds in 2025. And you're going to start to discover on the Sea of Japan side, there are way more attractions that you don't know about that you definitely should know about because the beaten path in Japan is full of suitcases and lots of travelers. It's stressful, right out there.

00:20:45 John Daub: I haven't talked to Craig. I don't know him, but we've interviewed him. I'm really excited about this. I'm looking for the TV show that I'm on. And you know, you get a chance to—that's me yesterday on the TV show. Kanai's sister sent me this clip from her TV. She didn't even know I was on. So she sent Kanai like a five-second clip of me on the TV show yesterday. But I wonder if Toyama is going to come out a big winner, if people are actually going to go there and visit. But what Craig is doing is really good. I think and the thought that he puts into the choices for the New York Times, despite the fact it's in the New York Times, I think he does a really good job with the consideration, the way he thinks about it. And again, you can check out Craig's blog and read more of this explanation on his website there, craigmod.com. He writes pretty thoroughly why he picked this location. And I'm really curious what he's going to pick next year. He's done a pretty good job with the list. I'm quite impressed.

00:22:00 John Daub: There are things that are on my radar. I went—and I think David and Alice are the only ones who know from the Patreon community—but I went to a place called Nishio in Aichi Prefecture last month. And this video is going to drop this month. I've already finished the edit and the people I worked with on this, they're kind of helping me with the historical background and checking this here. And we're going to put this video up. And I don't think anybody knows about the city of Nishio. It's right next to Okazaki where I used to live. I didn't know that they had—apart from Uji, Nishio also has one of the best matcha (powdered green tea) industries in Japan. There's Uji Matcha and then there's Nishio Matcha. And Nishio's matcha inside of Japan is as famous as Uji Matcha. But everybody's into the Uji because it's such a name brand. You sometimes forget that there are other brands that are pretty darn good. I can't really tell the difference when I taste it. I mean, it's matcha. Can you really tell the difference?

00:23:10 John Daub: They have a really good matcha industry. They have confections here that have Nishio Matcha on it. They're also one of the top places for unagi (eel). And they also have miso (fermented soybean paste), which is amazing. I had a local family—they make their own family's miso right from the vats that they cook it in and make it in. So this is going to be a pretty special episode. Mochi (rice cake), yeah, rice—they got it all in Nishio. As well as a guesthouse owner. He's the one who invited me. This guesthouse owner is 25 years old, used to work for Hoshino Resorts. He went to the University of Michigan, unfortunately. And I went to Ohio State. But we had a fun time together. I stayed at his guesthouse. He graduated, went back to his hometown, started a guesthouse, and now he's working to help bring tourists to his town. And he's doing an amazing job. And you're going to see this in the video. This is the kind of videos I want to bring you on Only in Japan this year. And I just want to thank everybody on Patreon for the support. I really do appreciate it, guys.

00:24:16 John Daub: It's been tough on the main channel. I got to get all these out there. But there's some good ones coming. Nishio is one of them. Maybe I got a picture that I can bring in here so we end this livestream. Any last comments from you guys before we end the livestream? There's so many places that we just don't know about yet that we can go to. I'm hoping that this year you're going to—on this channel, which is why you subscribe—I'm going to be able to take you and show you places that you've never seen before. Nishio is going to be one of them. This is a place that I had never really been to, even the fact that I lived really close by Nishio.

00:25:02 John Daub: Here's one. So this is the Takenoko no Sato, which is from Nishio Matcha. And this is a picture of me and Riku from his guesthouse. We were sitting outside of a teahouse next to the castle drinking some matcha, which is pretty incredible. Most of the tourists that do come here are people who live in Japan that I talk to. That's why they knew about it. But it's not in any guidebooks that I know about.

00:25:32 John Daub: All right, guys. I see Kerry's here. Welcome, Kerry. Enjoy and everybody. Thanks, everybody, for watching. I'll see you in another livestream tomorrow. There's a lot of stuff I wanted to introduce to you, but the Ohio State-Texas game was on this morning. I couldn't go and do what I wanted to do. So tomorrow, I'll bring you another livestream for a little bit. I think we'll do some food here. But this is a good one to talk about and kind of research because when you're planning a trip to Japan during the cherry blossoms, you're going to want to do some research. So I think the Sea of Japan side, pretty significant place. I think for the cherry blossoms, there's a better connection with nature out there than there is here in Tokyo. Not to say that Tokyo's not beautiful. It's just that connection with nature is why the cherry blossoms are so special, I think.

00:26:20 John Daub: And despite the fact that Tokyo has some really good parks, Toyama has the mountains, the sea, the food, less people, more authentic people. I was saying to a friend of mine that was what made Nishio really special is that you have friendly eyes instead of tourist industry eyes on you. When you are at a place where the tourist industry is very mature, people are looking at you differently. When you have friendly eyes, people who are really looking at you like as hosts and really glad that you're there and you can feel that in Nishio, well at least you can right now. There are places like that. Toyama is also another place I think that's very much like that and I think Morioka as well—it still retains that charm. So Aiken is here! Thanks for the hot chocolate! My nose is starting to run from the chill out here as the sun goes down in Tokyo. Alright guys, I'll see you tomorrow. We'll try to eat something hot or go get some food for the livestream but until then, mata ne! See you next time!