00:00:00 John Daub: Welcome to Tokyo, September 11th. You can see why Tokyo is so hard to travel in Japan in September. One reason is it's still kind of summer. Look at that pigeon really enjoying this art installation. That's how I feel. How you doing everybody? In this episode I wanted to talk about how this might be the most challenging month to travel in Japan. Mainly because of so many shifts after the summer season, which is very famous for the fireworks, for climbing Mount Fuji, for seasonal openings to islands, ferries, special transportation, special trains and cable cars. There's a lot of stuff that they amp up for summer. It sort of ends as soon as August 30th comes and goes. Like all this stuff just dies. And it gets really quiet. But it doesn't because tourism has created another wave of busyness that maybe they need to consider in the future. But right now, September, in my opinion, might be the most challenging month. And we're going to talk about that in this episode in deep detail.

00:01:20 John Daub: To sum up, the weather in Tokyo is 33 degrees Celsius. What is that like? Low 90s? Upper 80s? The humidity 55 percent? It's not like the beginning of August. It's not a sauna, but it is still hot. It is still summer. You feel it. And it's hotter than normal. Usually September 10th, everything just breaks towards fall. But we don't have that break this year. The weather in Tokyo looks like this: chances of afternoon rains, mostly cloudy, partly sunny, partly cloudy, stuff like that. The temperature is going to get up to 35 degrees, extended summer. That's like mid 90s. So it's quite high. And how do you pack for that? The other thing this doesn't show you is the low temperatures get much lower. So we're getting down into 23, 22. If you're in the mountains or away from Tokyo and Nagoya, a little bit out there, it gets into the teens. So it's really hard to pack for this. Maybe just throw a sweatshirt in there.

00:02:34 John Daub: Oh, look at the pigeons now. They're stealing the show. They're chilling in the grass. So they take a bath and then they towel off in the green grass. I love it. The other reason why it's really hard to travel in September is because of the seasonality of events taking place. It's not just the weather. We have typhoons and the unpredictability of the weather. You can see if you look up at the sky, it's blue over here, but it looks like it's going to rain over there. And it says at 2 p.m. Tokyo is going to have rain showers. But there's blue skies everywhere. How do you prepare for this? So it is extremely unpredictable.

00:03:44 John Daub: You have to be ready for summer heat. I've got flip-flops on kind of. Shorts. You can even get away with a tank top until about 4 or 5 p.m. But you probably want to have a change of clothes, have a button-down long-sleeve shirt and some slacks for the evening hours. Because even in the city, most people, except for tourists and yours truly, wear long pants. You can tell who the tourists are because they're wearing shorts and the locals are wearing long pants. You know what I mean? Can you tell? I think it's pretty easy. And that's exactly why I sometimes get looped in with tourists. Because I have a foreign face, I'm foreign. I've lived here for more than half my life. But I wear shorts. I kind of dress like all the tourists, which, what can you do? These are my people.

00:04:42 John Daub: Before we get into it, I saw what happened. I know a lot of you are writing this in here. I woke up this morning to the news of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who is an influencer on YouTube as well as going around campuses. And everyone's seen his content and it was shocking to me. Anybody who does this, you put yourself out in front of millions of people. Anything can happen. I was just shocked that he didn't have more security. But honestly, I don't want to think about it. Because he's got two little kids. It really hurt this morning. So I don't really want to talk about it yet. I woke up to the news. I saw the broadcasts. It's a despicable thing. Thanks, guys, for bringing it up. Let's try to stay on topic here.

00:05:59 John Daub: About September being a tough month. It really is. September sits between Japan's busy summer tourist season, July and August, and the hugely popular autumn foliage season in October and November. September's a weird place, isn't it? Because the foliage hasn't turned. It's not summer anymore because the beaches are closed in Japan. Jellyfish. That's pretty much why. At the end of August, there's so many jellyfish, it's not even worth going in there. Some attractions like alpine hiking lodges, some ropeways, mountain post offices—they close mid to late September, so that's gone. So you have the summer heat, but you don't have the summer goodness of all of the attractions. There's still a lot of attractions, but it's not quite the same.

00:07:00 John Daub: If you ever wondered where the vending machines are in Tokyo, if you look around you won't see them. Everybody who watches the livestream knows exactly where they are. They're underground in the basement. There's stairways on either end of the entrances or the exits. I guess you're not supposed to step in the water. The pigeons are exempt, but this is an art exhibit, sort of. A cooling system, so to speak. It does cool down the area because the bricks take in an amazing amount of heat.

00:07:43 John Daub: Silver Week. Do you guys know about this one? This is a big holiday that came about about 12, 13 years ago. We noticed that Shogatsu (New Year's) in January, Golden Week at the end of April, the beginning of May, and Obon, which is in the middle of August—massive domestic travel. Everyone's on a Shinkansen. Everyone's at the airport for these, like 10 days. It was real insanity when I first got here 25 years ago, when Japanese had more disposable income to travel abroad, to travel in general. It was craziness. Even then, you couldn't get on a Shinkansen. Now we have foreign tourism coming in here, and domestically, people are not traveling at the same numbers. We're losing a million people a year. So that's 25 million people lost since I got here. Japan had 20 to 25 million more people then than now. But they make up for it with about two to three million international tourists inside of Japan at any given month. So that sort of makes up for it. But I think it was more crowded when there were more Japanese traveling than it is with the international tourism.

00:09:21 John Daub: Silver Week came about as a way to take advantage of the fact that businesses still had to stay open during Obon and the other holidays. In order to give the people a break that had to work on those holidays, they came up with Silver Week. And now Silver Week has become a busy time, if not more busy than summer. And Silver Week is in mid to late September. I like Silver Week. It's not as golden as Golden Week. It's more silvery. But the problem now with Silver Week is that things get expensive at the end of late September. And I think for the tourism industry, this is a tweener season. September is a weird period where you don't have autumn foliage and you don't have the summer attractions. But Silver Week is now here and it's great for the tourism business. However, it creates havoc with people who are trying to save some money because it's a low season. I can't do that as much. Also, the festivals aren't here. There are a couple of fireworks festivals. I'm taking one of them in October, maybe live.

00:11:05 John Daub: Kanae and Leo are coming with me to film a main channel episode. Last year we did Western Tokyo in the fall. We rented a car and went out to West Tokyo. That's on my YouTube main channel. I think it's an amazing episode. Like 20 minutes of a place you probably never heard of inside of Tokyo where 99% of tourists that come to Tokyo never even go there. You might want to check out that episode. I'm taking you now this time up to Tohoku to a place that 99.9% of international tourists never go to. And it's such a waste. But September is a time where there's not a lot of stuff going on. I gotta be honest with you. It's kind of slow with events. You don't really have autumn festivals yet. Summer events just finished. Again, it's a tweener September. To throw everything in there, as I said with the weather being unpredictable, typhoons can hit at any time. So what do you pack? How do you do this?

00:12:01 John Daub: Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, I'm going to be doing another one of my "How do you pack for Japan" episodes live. And I'll take you into the store. Show you what the fashion looks like to give you an idea of what's selling. Because looking in the stores, you get an idea of how people prepare for it. But you can see a lot more people are bringing in these colored suitcases. Packing for Japan can be really hard. Historically, I can't remember a time where we had so many of these roller suitcases around. People used to be able to pack everything in a backpack. You'd have a suitcase that you'd carry around and you'd leave it at the hotel. But everyone seems to travel around. Oh, I am at the train station. But I just cannot remember, even domestically, people having all of these suitcases. People would pack duffel bags or something. But now everyone has these roller suitcases. Could be the international tourists. Just keep in mind you need a reservation on the Shinkansen. If you have an oversized bag that you can't store above, you need a special reservation for it.

00:13:36 John Daub: Over the course of the next two or three weeks, travel in Japan is going to be challenging. By the way, the postcards are off. I just sent these from the post office. This month is the mysterious castle of Matsuyama—Bitchu Matsuyama Castle. Shikoku Island is so amazing because this time of year in late September, the temperature cools off at night where it's like 10 degrees Celsius. And then it gets up to like 28 degrees during the day, creating this fog and mist. And Matsuyama City has it as well. I love this postcard. It's available now. If you sign up to the post office, you can get a postcard club. I'm on the back of it. You can see me right there. And Matsuyama Castle. And I have one on Dogo Onsen from a couple of years ago as well. Yeah, it's a great place to go in September, I think. Shikoku. You start getting the mist September, October, early November, and then it just turns to winter.

00:14:58 John Daub: Matsuyama Castle is one of these places where Japanese photographers have been taking photos for years. I know this stuff because I've been here for 27 years. Before the Internet, I used to get these travel magazines in Japanese. I couldn't read all of it. It was good study material. But you'd see the pictures in particular of onsen towns and different areas around the country. And that photo was always one that was really popular. So I don't know if, you know, influencers living here—a lot of people don't even know where Matsuyama is. Ehime Prefecture in Shikoku. Probably easiest by ferry from Hiroshima or you can come across on the Great Seto Bridge from Okayama. Okayama is a pretty good hub to get to Shikoku, actually. Yeah, I highly recommend it. That postcard just went out today. And for those in the postcard club that joined after September 11th, your postcards will come out as I get the notification of your card being billed. So it's always best to join the postcard club before the 12th of each month, which means today.

00:16:27 John Daub: I'm going to kind of walk around a little bit. Sorry if I missed any of the Super Chats earlier. Things are moving fast. I'll take some questions before we end the live stream. I got to get back. I got a lot of stuff to edit. I got the Mount Fuji episode that's nearly done about the post office at the top of Mount Fuji. Today, the Mount Fuji Trail officially closed—the Yoshida Trail is officially closed. So a lot of people were wondering, can you climb Mount Fuji in September? The answer is yes, you can. And it closed on the 10th. The post office closes on August 20th, but hiking to Mount Fuji closes on September 10th. And maybe the best time to climb Mount Fuji is the first few days in July that the trail opens or the last week before the trail closes. Why? Because people kind of don't know that you can climb the mountain outside of summer peak season. It's kind of cool. Mount Fuji is not, in my mind, a wonderful hike. There's a lot of better hikes around than Mount Fuji.

00:18:01 John Daub: I want to take some questions here from you guys. See if we can talk a little bit about your travel plans. What are your plans coming here in September? What would be a better time to go to Hokkaido? February or April? April. Because it's before Hokkaido's cherry blossoms. Usually they come around Golden Week, around May. Sapporo, I think, blooms around May 10th. So April is before the peak season. You have longer days as we get into June. The sun comes up earlier, so you have more sunlight. The cold is starting to break. So it's much more pleasant. February, unless you're looking specifically for ice and chill, the Sapporo Snow Festival has sort of jumped the shark. It's got so many international tourists. I don't think I'm going to be going there much. Maybe I'll take Leo there one year. But it's been covered so much. There's so many tourists there. People forget that Sapporo may be the biggest snow festival, but there are about a dozen really famous snow festivals. The Abashiri Ice Festival is really cool. It's much more local. They have a bar made out of ice. And they put LED lights in it, so you're drinking outside in sub-freezing weather.

00:20:38 John Daub: Does Nagano area get chilly start of October? I was in Nagano three days ago. Here's an image that's going to be in a main channel episode, maybe. So this is Nagano. This is an onsen that I went to visit. It was already cool. It was like 35, 36 degrees in Tokyo. And I had a long-sleeve shirt on here in Nagano, up on the mountain. I was about 800 meters up. This is a restaurant for lunch and an onsen with red water. The red water is iron-based, so it has a metallic smell to it. It's good for the skin. Super cool to soak in. There's the red bath I was in. Looks like chocolate, but it's water. You'd love to bathe in it. You got to go to Hakone for one of those theme baths. I'd say October is a little chilly. It's definitely at elevation now. You can feel fall. The humidity is gone. No more mosquitoes at elevation. It's pleasant. It does rain up in the mountains as well. But you get the misty. As I said about in October, you get the mist, the morning mist. It's very mysterious. You get the peaks, the steam around the trees, the pine trees up there. It's a beautiful thing.

00:22:57 John Daub: Is September cheaper than October? Yeah. These days with foreign tourists, I'd say it doesn't really get cheap. Maybe marginally cheaper than August. But I'd say it doesn't start to get cheap until after the autumn season. Like after Shogatsu. January 8th to before the cherry blossoms, like March 10th, it's a lot cheaper. I'd say like 20% cheaper. What is your favorite Kit Kat bar? Normal Kit Kat. I like normal. But that apple pie one that's out now, I'll see if I can get some for the Daimyo supporters and my Patreon supporters. For everyone who's a Daimyo supporter, on the 20th of this month, I'll be sending out Inside Your Box is a Mr. Donuts matchbox car with Japanese pondering donuts on the side. It's so cool. It's a nice collector's item. And a full bag of the apple pie Kit Kats. We have, I don't know, 22 Daimyo supporters now. So I'll get maybe 25 bags and see if anybody joins up. But yeah, I send these packages every month. Usually regional. I'm going to try to get something from up in Tohoku this month to put in the box along with that. So you're getting a pretty good box this month. Or maybe from Niigata because that's where I was. Nagano Niigata. The apple season is starting too.

00:24:56 John Daub: How is Fuji in October? Do you mean around the area? Oh, it's beautiful. It's cooled down a lot. It's before autumn. Autumn won't start until November. It's going to be late this year because the temperature has stayed warm. They say October is going to be warmer than usual. So there's a consensus that the fall is going to be warmer than usual years. So the autumn will be later. But the colors have not been as vibrant as in years past because of the brutal summers. It's just been so hot over the last three years. It's been a trend that the autumn colors are more brown. The orange isn't as orange as it used to be. Nikko in autumn is awesome. Maybe I'll take you there. My friend Greg Lamb? He's a Life Where I'm From YouTuber. He's been working on a house in Nikko that you can rent. He's such a good guy. He's working really hard on this thing. I might go up there. I'm a huge supporter of his as well. He renovated a house in Nikko. You can rent out a house up there and help support him.

00:26:41 John Daub: By the way, Kanae might be doing the same thing with a house in Tokyo. Mr. Seiichi, her grandfather, left his house. So she might renovate it. We're talking about it now. And then people can stay in Mr. Seiichi's house. It's in an old section of Tokyo. It's certainly unique. It's walking distance to Asakusa. So we'll tell you about that. That'd be pretty cool. I think that she doesn't want to tear it down and build a new house. But we want to renovate it because it was built like post-World War II. So we want to renovate it, try to keep the characteristics of it. The stairway is a little bit steep. But it's got some good character to it. Where Mr. Seiichi, a 95-year-old man, was living in there until he wasn't. And now it's been somewhat abandoned. We store some things in there. But we're going to fix it up, I think. House tour for sure. I have to film it before we start renovating it.

00:27:52 John Daub: I've got to go visit my friend Jaya. Do you guys know Jaya? If you don't know Jaya, you've got to go check out his channel. It's Tokyo Llama. T-O-K-Y-O-L-L-A-M-A. He's been renovating a house. Especially if you like abandoned houses and house renovations. He finished it. I went inside of it maybe about six months ago. So beautiful. And I promised him I'd buy some Wagyu steaks and go up there and barbecue them up there with Leo. Because then he'd go play in the grass. He has a couple of kids as well. I'm really happy to see a lot of young YouTubers that started after I did start to really grow. I've been promoting Chani Japan. She's an Aussie lady living in Wakayama, showing you the countryside. She's getting really creative with her episodes. Jaya's channel is creeping up there too with subscriber count. They'll probably both pass me soon. And they're showing another area of Japan that you probably wouldn't get if you were watching most of the YouTubers here that just show you the tourist attractions.

00:29:34 John Daub: Nico or Hakone in September? You can't go wrong with either place. Hakone is great if you want to stay at a traditional Japanese inn with an onsen. Nikko has that but I think the onsen's more popular in Hakone. You still might not be able to see Mt. Fuji. So if you can't see Mt. Fuji, Hakone is sort of... I'd say Nikko maybe. Hakone is great from November, December, January, February, March. Because you get the clear views of Mt. Fuji like 90% of the time. Once May hits, middle of May, April, June—it's like Hakone you're probably not going to see Mt. Fuji except on really clear days. I used to live on the base of Mt. Fuji in a town called Fujinomiya. And that's only like 10, 15 kilometers away from the summit. There were days where it was completely sunny in August. I couldn't even see it because the humidity was reflecting the blue sky. Mt. Fuji was completely gone.

00:30:45 John Daub: Are there still flower parks or flower gardens in September? Not really. They start closing them up or gearing up for winter. Believe it or not, there might be until the middle of September. But I'd say this is when they start phasing it out. Which makes it a transition season. By October most of the trees have been bundled up for fall. They'll take like tatami and wrap it around the tree to keep it warm for winter. It's also a spiritual thing I think. The gardens usually will be gone until March. Hokkaido is... I went up to Asahikawa last year around this time. In October you probably need a light down jacket in the evenings in Northern Hokkaido for sure. Or definitely like a proper jacket. Not a winter down but a light down jacket or a fairly warm jacket and gloves at night.

00:32:25 John Daub: What website do I need to look up the laws in Japan? As long as you have common sense, you're okay. The best thing to do is if you look around, observe the people around you and you kind of know what not to do. And if you're not sure, you can ask. But common sense rules today. I don't even think the Japanese know exactly all the laws. There's a societal norm. You kind of just know. Treat others like how you want to be treated. That is rule number one.

00:33:12 John Daub: September is still good for the open roof buses here. They take off from over there. The Hato Bus, the yellow bus. Half of them don't have a top on it which is not great for typhoon season. But you can see over here we have clouds coming in. There are some festivals that take place. I love this area, Marunouchi. They do have festivals that take place along the street going towards Hibiya Park. They close it down on the weekends so you can get artisanal coffee and artisanal... I wish Japan would embrace cinnamon rolls more.

00:34:17 John Daub: We have this switch on the side of it. Turn it on to manner mode or silent mode when you're on a train, on public transportation. If you're inside your room, turn it off. If you're out and about, most people put it on. Put it on vibrate. It's just a polite thing in Japan. Don't leave your cologne at home. Leave your Axe sprays at home. Don't bring it to Japan. You want to upset locals? Spray yourself with cologne and perfume during the day, especially the summer. That's the worst. And walk around with it and trail your scent, which isn't even your scent. It's someone else's scent that they came up with and marketed it to you so you could smell all perfumey. Probably B.O. is better than having perfume and B.O. So you definitely should leave your smelly perfumes at home. Deodorant is usually okay, but I use the non-scented stuff. The most inoffensive smells probably like yuzu, citrus smells, natural smells. But these perfumes, all of the Japanese friends that I talk to, that's one of the top five things. Leave your colognes and scents at home. It's too strong. Soap is a great smell. Yuzu, citrus... Or if you need a scent, you can go and bathe at the yakitori restaurant in the smoke. Or okonomiyaki restaurant. You'll come out smelling like that. That's a pretty pleasant smell.

00:37:00 John Daub: The one thing that I learned living here in Japan is that people wash their clothes. My wife washes towels after one use. It drives me crazy. But clothes don't smell here. I used to use Old Spice. I don't use it anymore. Because you start to get health conscious because of the internet. And my wife said that she doesn't like it. So I use the non-scented, organic stuff. When I used to go to the U.S. and I would come back to Japan, Kanae told me that she could smell that my body smelled different from the foods that I ate. And after about 10 days, the smell would go away. Because her sense of smell—and I think maybe this is a Japanese thing—the sense of smell in Japan is so much more acute than Westerners. I think also the palate, the tastes are more acute. Which is why Japanese cuisine is so good. So leave your deodorants at home. If you eat tofu, vegetables, unprocessed meats, typically the body doesn't smell as bad. Hotels have laundry. It's a good idea to pack light and do the laundry a couple times.

00:39:45 John Daub: Do those body mints work? People use the body sheets. Biore, which is a company here, has these body sheets that you can wipe off the sweat. The office workers use it. And it will make you feel fresh again. Because the summer is brutal. Your cologne is not going to mask anything. Everybody is oblivious to your own smell. You're oblivious to your own smell. My 4-year-old son said after he takes a duty, he says, it doesn't smell. And I said, yeah, it doesn't smell because you like your own smell. Everybody likes the scent of their own smell. But you don't even notice it because your sweat and your stink mixes in with your perfume. And you have double stink. It smells nasty. And so we in Japan, we're not confrontational. We don't say anything. But we are silently saying something to you.

00:41:11 John Daub: Like when you visit someone else's house, there's a different smell. Sometimes it's pleasant, like potpourri. And sometimes it's not. Pre-marriage, it probably smelled like pizza at my house. Alright, it's raining right now, believe it or not. I've got blue skies and it's raining over there. Alright, I've got to cut this off. It's been 40 minutes. I think we've gone well beyond the fact that September is hard to prepare for. But it is. The postcards are on the way for Patreon supporters. If you'd like one, absolutely, I will send you one. Until then, see you in the next livestream. See you.