00:01 John Daub: There you go. Right there is a Somei Yoshino (Yoshino) cherry blossom tree, and you can see, obviously, not even close to having any kind of budding or blossoms in any shape or form. It's just kind of this is the winter sakura (cherry blossom) tree. But that didn't stop the Japan Meteorological Agency yesterday from posting the latest update on where the cherry blossoms are going to be blooming, the schedule. It's not going to be accurate, folks. I know every time one of these comes out, it makes news, it makes a buzz, because we're all getting pretty excited with the cherry blossoms. So much so that when February hits, getting closer to Valentine's Day, they start to release sakura products. That's right. As soon as February first started, I started to see the rollout of all of the cherry blossom stuff. This was at the convenience store, the sakura-flavored sakura milk Starbucks latte, which is, well, we'll try this in the live stream as well.

01:06 John Daub: I love this season, because Valentine's Day also is red and pink, so then pink with the cherry blossoms is a tie-up with this, so the marketing goes crazy right before Valentine's Day for cherry blossoms. I'm kind of feeling it now, but I'm looking at the trees, and I don't feel it as soon as I turn around. Check it out. This whole road is filled with these Somei Yoshino variety of trees, and it's just kind of dead. There's a beautiful one right on the corner. This is leading towards Monzen-nakacho. That's what it looks like in February, folks. Live shot from Tokyo, about six weeks away.

01:50 John Daub: You can see some of the branches have grown here, but over the summer and after the blossoms, let's take a look now more closely. WRX Tours in the House, welcome! Let's look more closely at this schedule and kind of put the pieces together here. So, we have here, let's start at the bottom. We would say this is West Japan, not South Japan. In Japan we consider this to be West. West Japan down on the very tip of Kagoshima, down there, you have Nagasaki. It's going to be blooming before March 20th, they say. Everything could change depending on how cold or how warm and how much sun we get over the next six weeks. Then the rest of Kyushu is going to be blooming a little bit later on. Fukuoka, it says here March 25th. Guestimate. That's when it starts.

02:55 John Daub: And then you move up east towards Tottori, Okayama, part of that, the Hiroshima and Osaka, part of Osaka and Kyoto there. That's going to be the 29th. It's just four days later. Now there's one little caveat here. If you take a look at Tokyo right in the center, it's circled. That is a special zone because it's just warmer here. Maybe it's because of the surrounding mountains in the Tama region or the urbanization, a lot of the glass blasting sunlight onto the trees. But that usually means that Tokyo comes earlier than the rest of the area of Kanto. If you look up towards Tohoku, Sendai is a little bit earlier. You can see Sendai. It says it's coming here on April 6th. So if you ever miss the cherry blossoms in Tokyo, just go north. So you go north into Tohoku, you get to Aomori. It's April 20th about. Hirosaki, typically the 22nd, up in the north of Aomori.

04:01 John Daub: And then you get Hokkaido up here. Sapporo coming in around the end of April. Sapporo, it's blooming around Golden Week, actually. From April 29th to May 5th, you have the cherry blossoms up in Sapporo. Right now, they've got the Snow Festival. Cherry blossoms is the furthest thing from their minds right now. This schedule just came out in February. And here's the list once again for historical purposes. You have Sapporo. They're predicting April 28th here. And it's three days earlier than usual. Usually it's May 1st or something. You have here Aomori is listed up as the 19th. Three days. So yeah, this schedule... I'll put a link in the description if you want. Kyoto says here the 29th. So it's about two days earlier than normal. But Kyoto is three days later. So yeah, just take a look. You can take a look at the schedule. But a lot of this doesn't really mean much of anything. Which is like, why am I even bringing this to you? Because it's fun. And it's a live view of Tokyo. And we get to talk about cherry blossoms.

05:26 John Daub: This is the time of year where people start to get excited about spring. Because we have all of the products coming out. That's what the strawberry sakura milk thing looks like on the shelves. And this is also the sakura beer that's Sapporo. And then Asahi Super Dry cans get the cherry blossom packaging right there. That's so cool. My advice to you if you're in Japan and you live here: go pick up like a six pack of beer now. Because that is really cold and windy right now. It feels a lot colder. Go pick up a six pack of beer now. And then a six pack of the wrapped cherry blossom thing. And sit on it until March. A beer can sit around in a can for a little bit. Just keep it maybe on your balcony. Because by the time the cherry blossoms roll out, those wrapped cans, the pink Asahi Super Dry cans, they're no longer out there. It's like this weird thing where the marketing starts a month before the actual event. You won't be able to find those pink cans of things. So if you wanted to sit underneath the cherry blossom and drink pink canned Asahi Super Drys or the sakura beer from Sapporo beer, you can't find it anymore. So just a little bit of a heads up. It all sells out quick. Because they move on to the next thing before the actual event happens. It's the same with all of the products. They might come out with the sakura Kit Kat again. And if they do, by the time the sakura come out in April, there's no more of that anymore. Because they've sold out and moved on to the next marketing thing. So just a little bit of a heads up on the way Japan markets things here.

07:04 John Daub: Alright. Let me show you a little bit of other stuff. So we're going to be getting this is the sample tree for the Japan Meteorological Agency. This is at Yasukuni Shrine. I was here about five years ago and a couple of years ago. And you can see the first blossoms in Tokyo usually come out here. I would say you might even see a blossom as early as March 11th. The rest of the trees in the city probably not blooming yet. But this one sort of does. Because Yasukuni is very much in the center of Tokyo. Where maybe the exhaust gas from the cars makes it warmer. I don't know. But I think it's once they have eight or eleven blossoms on the tree, they say that the season in Tokyo has started. This was about two days after they started the season. You can see like popcorn. All the sakura blossoms started to pop up on the indicator tree is what they call it in Yasukuni Shrine.

07:57 John Daub: If you guys didn't already see this. It's not a popular episode on my main channel for some reason. This is one of my favorite stories. About a thousand year old sakura tree. Miharu Takizakura (Miharu waterfall cherry blossom) is the sakura tree that represents Japan. And I made an episode on this. If you haven't already seen it. This is the introduction to it. It's such a beautiful episode. It is massive. Again over a thousand years old. They can't quite place exactly who planted it etc. But they know they can date it back to a thousand years or more. And they have some pictures from the Edo period. And there's some history behind it. But this is the tree. If you ever see Japan's sakura, this is the one that represents the season. And it's up in Fukushima in Miharu. And I went up there and made an episode. With I call it the world's most beautiful tree. I really do think so. It represents Japan for springtime. And it blooms later than in Tokyo. So if you ever look at that, it just kind of sticks out. Everything around it. It's just a beautiful tree. But they've gotten rid of it and made it into a park. So it's worth going around here.

09:04 John Daub: And before this. Thank you guys. Many of you have watched it. For those of you that go there and see it. If you go before the white blossoms come, they have pink blossoms in the first week of its blooming. Then the pink blossoms fall away. And it blooms again with white blossoms. Then they go away. And then the green come out. That's the Takizakura variety. It is so beautiful. That's the one where you get it's like the weeping willow cherry blossom. Where the pink comes out. Especially in the morning. It's so stunning. And then those fall away. And the white blossoms come out. And then those fall away. It's like a double blossom. It's really awesome. So if you ever get a chance to go up there, I would say it gets about 300,000 tourists every year. So it might be worth the trip.

09:54 John Daub: Thank you to Michael Sassano as well. I saw that a super chat came in. I appreciate it brother. Aloha when you have some time to get a snack. Thank you for that. That also means that this drink, which I'm about to take part in, is brought to you by Michael Sassano with some aloha spirit. I'm going to open it up here. It's called the Berry Berry Sakura Milk. I guess it doesn't have like actual sakura. It's just berry. But it says sakura. And that means something somewhere. Alright let's give it a try. Thank you guys. It's so cold. My fingers are frozen. Oh. Forgot to shake it. Kind of swirl it around there. Alright. Itadakimasu. It just tastes like milk with sugar and strawberries. That's it. It's like strawberry milk. But there's a very, very, very small amount of like floral. Maybe some sort of chemical that gives it some kind of floral taste to it. It's good.

11:26 John Daub: I mean, it's good. You have to look. I live in Japan where things blow you away all the time. And there's marketing gimmicks all the time. So it takes a lot to blow me away. I mean I've had cucumber Pepsi. I've had hot ginger ale out of the vending machine that tasted like apple pie. Which is pretty cool. Canada Dry ginger ale that's been heated up tastes pretty cool actually. And I mean that like cool as in a good thing. So hopefully the cherry blossoms do come out earlier than usual because I certainly can't wait to get rid of this cold temperature. With the wind chill right now, there is a wind chill. It is really, really cold.

12:11 John Daub: This whole road here is cherry blossom trees. And makes something of a tunnel. Especially down the end of it. Down at the end of this, it turns into a cherry blossom tunnel. And it is quite beautiful. Tatsu writes in here. How much was it? It was 219 yen or 236 with the tax. That's about $1.55. There you go. Again, buy these now. Because they sell out. I'd say before March you can't find these anymore. So if you're a resident of Japan go and get cherry blossom stuff. And then save it. And then when the cherry blossoms do bloom, everyone will be talking to you at the hanami (cherry blossom viewing) like, where did you get that? You're like, yeah, well I got that in February. Because I planned. I did some real serious planning here.

13:12 John Daub: That's the way it goes. I'll put a link in the description also for the website. This is the site that releases this every year. This one came out, the weather communication provider. I guess this is the news for the meteorological association or agency. And it came out on the sixth. The schedule here. And I have it bookmarked. I'm always checking it out. And it is, it gives you hope when you see it. Right. It gives you hope when you see the schedule here and the information. It gives you indexes and all this other stuff. So it's worth checking out and bookmarking this page as well. I'll put the link in the description so guys can go check it out.

13:58 John Daub: This is my favorite tree in this area. Actually there's two of them. One is the one right on the corner of this intersection. We're on my favorite place. This is where Kanae danced five years ago for us. I'm still waiting for her to fulfill her promise to do it again. But this whole area, this park is filled with cherry blossoms. You can go across the river to Monzen-nakacho and Etchujima. But it's this park along this canal that's also filled with cherry blossoms. And it's a beautiful place. It's near Monzen-nakacho. It's so beautiful. They have food stands as well I believe. So it's a kind of a festival feeling. It's so cold. This is one of my favorite trees right here. And you can see it just branches out over this corner of this intersection. And if you keep walking across the street it gets a lot really quiet. And then you go down some steps about 75 meters this way. And on the steps is this cherry blossom tree that just hangs over the steps. It's so beautiful. That would be a place where you want to sip a drink or eat a bento on those steps there. Which I have done before.

15:11 John Daub: So there you go. I'm pretty excited about this. I'm looking forward to spending some cherry blossom time with you on a live stream as well as maybe making an episode on cherry blossoms. I haven't done that in a while. But according to a lot of you, you really want me to go down to see the first cherry blossoms. The variety which will be opening up pretty soon in Shizuoka. So I'm going to try to make some time to go down there for the day. And then film maybe even a main channel episode about the first cherry blossoms in Japan. Is this particular variety. I did one on the winter cherry blossoms that already bloomed in January. There's a variety that blooms in January. There's a live stream I did last month. That variety, it's already gone those cherry blossoms. So they only bloom in the, I believe they bloom twice a year. But the place in Shizuoka is the variety that blooms the earliest. And I'll go down there and go check out that festival and try to get in the spirit of it. It's about an hour and ten minutes from Tokyo. So it's kind of a far train ride. But might be worth it.

16:20 John Daub: You can see the Skytree through the, I think a lot of you were encouraging me to go do it. So I'm putting it in my calendar. I'm about 85% chance that I'll probably go. Which is pretty awesome. It's pretty high. Just depends, a lot of stuff will be coming up. But you can see, there's no cherry blossoms yet. And of course not in the Skytree in the distance. A live shot of Tokyo right now. You might even see SpaceX [?] go by in a minute.

16:51 John Daub: Alright everybody, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I'd love to hear from you. I've got a main channel episode that I'm working on. You can see it on Patreon. Maybe I'll tease it next time. But the day after tomorrow, I'll be celebrating another birthday. And five years ago I was here at the coldest town in Japan. It got down to minus 28 that night. It's pretty crazy. But that was, this was like five years ago. That's so crazy. Alright everybody, I'll see you tomorrow in another live stream. Stay warm. It is freaking cold out here. Oh my gosh. I can't wait to get back in. I need a hot coffee. Thanks guys for the super chats. I'll see you again real soon. Matane. Get some sunshine at least. Nice to be outside. But my gosh.