00:00 John Daub: In this episode, we're going to be talking about the beautiful autumn foliage. As you can see, I'm wearing a jacket. The rain is coming down. I just walked from Yurakucho here, and the weather is much cooler. You'll see tourists wearing shorts, but the locals all have either a jacket or an umbrella, or they're just trying to make it through the day because it's one of those wet ones here. We'll see some tourists behind me right there. Is she carrying a sword? Hold on a second. What is that? Is that some kind of ninja? We're not supposed to be able to see the ninja. I guess it's a guide. I think it might be some sort of tour guide. Anyway, cosplay maybe? It's interesting. It could be an umbrella. Katayama once sent me a katana umbrella. They're kind of cool. You can get them in Japan. But you might get stopped every now and then in public transportation. Like, is that a real sword? It sure looks like one.

01:12 John Daub: Anyway, if you take a look at the guide here, I want to show you the autumn foliage schedule. This is from September 2nd, but it's now a month later. But it might be just a couple of days later because September was quite hot. You see the autumn foliage in Sapporo for the yellow stuff starting November 6th, which seems a little late. It starts to hit Tokyo around the 26th. So that's like the yellow foliage. But the more popular one is the red foliage. This is certainly a lot later—maybe like December 1st in Tokyo. It says November 30th. Sapporo, November 7th. Fukuoka down there, December 9th. I think it's going to be a little bit later than that, to be honest. And you can see at elevation, it's also later. Those patches in the middle of Tohoku region. That means that the autumn foliage is going to be later. I think they'll adjust this, probably release something.

02:09 John Daub: Hey, I've seen Brandy in Nashville. I made a Seinfeld reference to her. I said, don't forget the barbecue sauce. Remember Seinfeld, the doll? That was one of my favorite episodes because it was a creepy one. Nice to see you, Brandy. Take care. I'm always streaming when you're at the airport. It looks like the autumn foliage is going to be a little bit later. But if you're at elevation, not so much. You can always catch it at Mt. Takao if you're coming a little bit earlier to Tokyo. On the right side is Takao-san at 599 meters up. The autumn foliage starts at the top around November 9th and goes on to about the 22nd. So it's about three weeks earlier at elevation in Tokyo. And Takao-san's in Tokyo at even higher elevation. You have the autumn foliage starting at the end of September. But Japan is a country with volcanoes, with mountains, a lot of scenic places. You go to Hakuba, where the ski resorts are. They have unbelievable autumn foliage before the ski season. So it does make a lot of sense to go there in October.

03:34 John Daub: Here's the schedule. Sapporo starting on the 7th of November. Sendai on the 26th—so much later. Tokyo on the 30th. Compared to last year, it's two days later, which means the summer was hotter. This schedule comes from September 2nd, so this could have been altered again. This is the latest from the Japan Meteorological Agency. I think they'll probably give an update today or tomorrow. So it looks like everything is going to be pushed back. The autumn foliage is not really that good at lower elevations until December now. So those coming in December, you're in for a treat. Those that came too early, time to climb a mountain. Osaka is December 4th.

04:35 John Daub: Autumn doesn't start to feel like autumn until like right now. This is the first day, really. Autumn can be felt as early as late August and early September in Hokkaido and northern Japan. Peter von Gomm and I were riding up northeast Hokkaido, and it was like 17 degrees at night, which is chilly. You need a light jacket. It got down to like 12 degrees or 10. There's no humidity up in northeast Hokkaido, which makes it really great to visit in the summer, especially if you want to escape it. I'm talking about Nemuro, the national parks up on the northeast side there. They're really beautiful. Just watch out for the bears. Tokyo starts to feel it late September, early October. And this is the first day that we're really starting to feel like autumn. Maybe it's the rain, but it was about last week. I could open up the window and turn off the air conditioning. Previously, I had to keep the air conditioning on because of the humidity. But now we can leave the windows open in Tokyo and it's a nice feeling. You don't have to have any air conditioning running.

06:11 John Daub: Kyushu and Okinawa, southern Japan comes much later. I think one of the best times in Okinawa is October. The ocean there is really nice. It's cooled down. You get typhoons every now and then, but it's such a wonderful time to be in Okinawa in October. I think that might be one of the higher seasons. Summer is gone, but people want to get around. I did get this from the Hokkaido store. You can see the jack-o'-lanterns started to come out at the stores. This is a pumpkin pie from the company that makes the Marusei butter sandwiches up in Hokkaido. You start to see the stuff around September 1st. But this year at the last week of August, I started to see autumn stuff. It's a little bit early. Hey, Jeff Kennedy. I hope the postcard made it to you over there on the East Coast. If you ever get your postcard go missing, I will always send you a new one. It's like better than AppleCare. Just send me a direct message. It usually takes about two weeks to get to you, but the last two months it's been taking a month.

07:28 John Daub: Postcard link at patreon.com/onlyinjapan. Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate that. Thank you, Joy. This is one of my favorite times of the year. The weather in September is much better than July and August. I'd say around September 10th, sure it's still kind of hot, but the days are longer. The one reason I don't like the winter is that the sun sets too early in Japan. We're already seeing the sun start to go down around 5:30. It's dark before six now. You really got to be an early morning person in Japan because the sun rises in the summer around 4:30 and in the winter around 6:30. So it's good to get as much sun as possible. Weather is perfect in Himeji. Well, not so much in Tokyo. We've got a lot of rain. Look how wide the lens is on this iPhone 17. The main lens is the same as the wide lens on the old one. That's crazy.

09:01 John Daub: It's been two years since my first trip to Japan. I spent my time mainly in Kamakura and Ofuna. I think it's time for another trip here, buddy. I'm going to walk this way because just keep walking—there's a lot of restaurants underneath the Yamanote line over there. So we're going to go check that out. This is also where you would catch those hot tub buses. Do you see that? These are the hot tub buses, the tour buses around Tokyo. They're not going to be open top today, but there's some pretty good trips that you can take. It's kind of cool with the open top when they go over the Rainbow Bridge and you get to absorb all of Tokyo. You'll see some of the trains going above me there. Any questions about autumn and how the weather changes in Japan? Because I know packing your suitcase when you come at this time of year, you're packing more clothes, but you don't really need to. You can buy a lot of stuff here. It's always fun to have a new jacket or new clothes from a trip abroad. The only issue is that in Japan, the clothes don't fit the same way for most people in the West. The shoulders are a little bit more narrow. Japanese tend to have shorter legs. So the clothes sort of fit that. But you can still find stuff. A lot of companies now have foreign sizes as well as domestic sizes. Even L.L. Bean here has Japanese sizes and foreign sizes. They have a Japan size sticker that says this is meant to fit Japanese sizes—the shoulders are narrower and the pants a little shorter.

11:00 John Daub: I plan on shopping at Uniqlo. I love Uniqlo, but mostly just underwear and socks and t-shirts because I can never find shirts or pants to fit me. They do have 3XL, but it's really 4 or 5XL here because things are about a size smaller. Uniqlo has up to 5XL on some items. The Ginza one, the bigger ones usually have a special area with over 2XL, which is great. They also have really small sizes too. My wife used to be XS size—not anymore. Now she says she's medium. I don't buy it. I think she's still small. South Korea has a better fit. I think guys in Korea have broader shoulders than Japanese. I'm not sure though. I'm just saying generally a lot of my Korean friends back in the day were a little bit bulkier than Japanese guys.

12:42 John Daub: Some other things to think about the seasonal signs here. The Equinox, which is September 23rd—actually still pretty warm on that day, but you do feel that the tide has turned on summer. The typhoon season is still here. Even though it's October 1st, we're still going to get usually some typhoons until the middle of October and they will go into November. A lot of the rain that comes in are from typhoons. Stores begin stocking seasonal foods. As I said, matsutake (pine mushrooms) are already here. The persimmons, the dried persimmons are so good. The sanma (Pacific saury). Shout out to my friends in Nemuro. I got to go back up there and see them. Tai-san sent me a whole crate of sanma. He's like family now. He owns a convenience store chain up in the Nemuro area. It's so awesome. And the red spider lilies start to bloom.

13:45 John Daub: You can see there's a lot of restaurants underneath here and they're pretty active at lunchtime and then again after 6 p.m. A lot of people get off work and come here. But we're seeing more and more English menus available. And the prices are the same. You can tell because if they put the Japanese menu on the outside, it's very easy to tell. I haven't seen too many dishonest businesses that charge different prices on English menus. It's been pretty consistent. But there are places—this is not a tourist center. This is a lot of locals will go out to eat here. But you're going to see more of the autumn menu, the autumn cuisine coming out a lot more—chestnuts, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, kabocha (Japanese pumpkin). You'll see more grapes. The muscat are out. The peaches are gone now. Laura, my friend visiting here, I gave her two peaches—the last that I could find. Autumn cuisine is maybe the best in Japan. It's so filling and so delicious. I think it's a good balance with natural sweetness from the sweet potatoes, the chestnuts. The mushrooms are amazing in Japan. So you're going to get a lot of mushrooms in the cuisine in the fall—matsutake, but all mushrooms because it's the harvest season. You can go out and forage and get them actually in the forest.

15:31 John Daub: No, the peaches are done right now. I saw them in the stores last week, but I can't find them anymore. Maybe you'll see one or two, but the peaches are done. They come out around August and they're done pretty much at the end of September. Maybe you'll start to see them in the middle of July. The blueberries as well. It's very seasonal. You can import them—you'll find them from other countries at Costco perhaps. But I don't really see them. We're having more signal issues. I was saying this as no one was watching me because the stream wasn't apparently working. But if this iPhone continues to mess up, I think it might be the app. When electrical items that I have for streaming don't work well, we give them a name. And if you remember Toby (crow), he had a name because he was a bad crow. We've had gimbals with names and we might get this iPhone a name. You can hear the trains above. Hopefully the audio is still going. They've been adding more of these bicycle parking spots. Try to keep the bicycle parking limited to certain areas. Make sure you don't just stop on the street somewhere.

17:24 John Daub: There's the Osho. Gyoza no Osho is here. It's a famous shop. Lot of good food. This is certainly underneath the Yamanote line local. This is not a touristy thing, but they do have English menus. So I kind of recommend walking around Yurakucho underneath the subway line. Oh, this is the Marugoto Seimen. Look at that. There's a line out the door for the udon. They do have poisonous mushrooms here in Japan. There's mushrooms that you can't eat here. But I have an episode on this on the main channel. If you search Japanese mushrooms Only in Japan, you're going to get that episode. And I go over about 20 different varieties of mushrooms, including one that was purple, which is really awesome. You could eat that. I went out with a professional mushroom forager and we made tempura out of it like on the spot. She brought some oil and we went to a spot and made mushroom tempura. I'll suggest it. I put it into the end of the channel feed here. So it's a good episode, especially when you come to Japan and you don't know what the heck all these mushrooms are. When I was in the United States, we had one kind of mushroom. It was called mushroom. And then you come to Japan—there's enoki, eringi, matsutake. There's like a dozen kinds. It's so good. A lot of them are farmed, but their farms are very good. They're organic farms. Yamagata is very famous for it. Year round, you'll get mushrooms. But it just tastes different at this time of year. Button mushrooms, the ones that are in the Mario Brothers except those are red. Portobellos. Yeah, they got all that stuff here. It's amazing.

20:13 John Daub: Any questions? 26-01 was released today to talk about connection issues. Okay, that's good. So I'll update the iOS tonight. I'll put the livestream here so you guys can see it. I see Ninja Monkeys here in Gibraltar. How you doing? I was in Gibraltar back in 1997. I didn't have a good time with the monkeys, but I certainly hung out a lot. I met a guy from Argentina at the guesthouse and we went drinking quite a bit for a couple of days. You have to walk across the airport runway to get to the city. That was cool. Doesn't seem like there's any real questions here. What is your favorite autumn meal or limited food? A mosquito slayer. So this is the time of year. I think if you come to Japan, anybody who makes a trip to Japan has to go to a ryokan (Japanese traditional inn). You really have to go to a ryokan. And when you do that, you get the seasonal local cuisine. But in autumn, you get everything. And it's very kaiseki-ryori (multi-course Japanese cuisine), very beautiful cuisine. Autumn is my favorite season in Japanese cuisine, especially kaiseki-ryori. Miso soup in the fall is real good too. Maybe the miso just tastes better. Everything just tastes better in the fall because the summer heat is gone.

22:10 John Daub: My favorite dish, maybe katsudon. Breaded deep-fried pork cutlet on a bowl of rice with egg and dashi that just soaks into the rice on the bottom. Or tendon. Tendon in the autumn is maybe the best. It's various tempura on a bowl of rice. And if it comes right out of the fryer, they put that tare, the dashi sauce on it. And if the tempura is still hot from the fryer, when that dashi sauce hits the deep-fried tempura, it sizzles just a little bit. That's how you know it's fresh. And it's savory, but still crunchy. Ah, it's the best. There's a couple of good tendon places in Ginza around here, but I don't want to tell you about it. All right, everybody, take care. I'll see you in another livestream tomorrow. We'll probably talk more about autumn in the coming days, the cuisine. But yeah, if you do, the apple pie KitKats are still out. There's pumpkin pie at the Hokkaido store over there. This is in Yurakucho. That right there is the Hokkaido store, the orange one. They got the Royce dark chocolate potato chips. I'm not joking—they're really good. Make sure you get those if you come to Japan. The Royce chocolate potato chips, especially the dark chocolate ones, are so good. All right, guys, take care. I'll see you in another episode. As I get ready to go home, we're taking you to Akita Prefecture in two days. Get ready. We are going to Akita. All of you coming with me. Don't forget to subscribe. See you.