00:01 John Daub: I just arrived here at this spot. I'm just leaving Akiyama-go. This is a village in the middle of the mountains in Nagano on the Nagano-Niigata border. I'm going to show you the map where it is. This is the middle of somewhere and nowhere all at the same time. It's absolutely beautiful and stunning and weird. I found something that I think is quite shocking here. Let me park the car. We can go outside for a little bit.

00:29 John Daub: But I like to take you to places on this channel all around Japan that you normally would never go. You would never see this, which is a shame. Just check it out. I'm going to pan around here. You can see that this is a yakidango (grilled dumpling) mochi place. It's closed. It's supposed to be open every day, but I guess it's just on the weekends. It makes sense because if you look around, there's like nobody here. So it doesn't make a lot of sense for the shop to be open every day. At least not at this time of year.

01:01 John Daub: It's really cold. You can see the running water. Just the whole village has running mountain water through it. You can hear it. Maybe we'll go up there for a second. Go take a look at that running water. I say that because the signal is only good like right here. This is what is weird. It's just right here. It's nice, right? Yesterday, a cold front came through Japan. Tokyo is really cold. You need like a light down jacket or something today. The rain brought in a chill. It's actually warmer here than it is in Tokyo, which is weird. It's right now 8 degrees Celsius, which is about 46 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not too bad. I got a sweatshirt and a rain jacket on, so it's good to keep warm. It was raining the day before yesterday. I hiked section 9 of the Shinetsu Trail with a guide yesterday. It was really good. My legs are quite tired. I woke up a little bit of pain, but nothing too bad.

02:09 John Daub: Let me show you where we are on the map before we get too deep into this here. This is Japan, and Tokyo is on the right side there. I start there, and then I'm going to take you up to the northwest into a little village called Akiyama-go. It's really, really nestled in here, okay? So when you see this map, it gives you a really good idea of where I am, not just because it's a map. It's because we are in, like, the mountains, not kind of up off of the river. I think we're about 800 meters up. These peaks are about 2,000 to 2,200 meters high, the guy told me yesterday. Look at, this is what the village looks like with a little bit of snow. They get a lot of snow here. They even have a tourist information office. I went by there. There's a museum in there that was really nice. I went by in there to film a little bit, but there's not a lot of people. The population, of course, like all the other towns in Japan, has shrunk quite a bit. You see the Joshinetsu Kogen National Park? That's where the snow monkeys are, so I'm not that far away from the Nagano snow monkeys, where they're sitting in a hot bath, taking it easy like monkeys typically do.

03:33 John Daub: But I found something creepy. I was staying at a place called Deguchiya. Fukuhara-san is the proprietor there. He's the owner. Fukuhara-san is also a matagi (traditional mountain hunter). Do you guys know, have you ever heard this word, matagi? I think it comes from an Ainu word. They're more well-known up in Tohoku and also here in the mountains in Niigata and Nagano, but he's one of the last matagi. A matagi is a spiritual hunter, somebody who, they don't hunt for enjoyment. They hunt because they have to, for the meat and for the fur, for the goods. It's more of a connection with the yamanokami (mountain gods), and I interviewed him, and I wanted to talk about it. There's been a lot of bear attacks in Japan. The trails are not as populated as they were in the past, which is a shame. We didn't encounter any bears yesterday, although I did see a mountain goat, which is pretty cool. I forget what they're called in Japanese, but I'll show it to you in the episode that I'm working on here.

04:42 John Daub: This is a photo of the matagi in snow with his faithful dog, and they go around and they have to look for food, right? They're very spiritual, connected with the mountains, so the hunting of bears is not an enjoyment, a recreational thing. It's something that they do for life. They use every part of it, including the bones and the meat and everything, and it's been like this for a very long time. I could show you an image as well, this one here. A little bit smaller, but the matagi have captured a bear, which they're going to use to feed the village, and with the bear attacks happening, they're starting to call the bears, but here, they don't do that. They maybe get one or two bears a year, and it's for food. It's for sustenance, which I thought was really interesting. It's just a different way to look at it.

05:40 John Daub: The mountain goats in Japanese is, what is that? I don't even know what that means. That could be the sound that they make, for all I know. They're really, really nice creatures, though. You want to see my breakfast this morning? Here's my dinner last night at Deguchiya. Oh, no, no. This is at the Katakuri no Yado. This is the place I was at in the parking lot a couple days ago. I ate the food here. I didn't expect this kind of cuisine in the middle of, well, nowhere. Again, it's somewhere, but it's not a place that anyone knows about, but the chef is from Kansai. The owner is from Kansai, Shizuoka, as well, and it was really, really good. That wasn't my beer. Two people that were visiting, Japanese that were visiting from Tokyo, shared their beer with me because they wanted to do a kanpai. There weren't any other guests there, just me and them, and we talked for a lot of it across the way, which is about two meters away, our tables were. But it was kind of fun to do that.

06:54 John Daub: Yesterday during the hike, I also discovered a lot of mushrooms. This one is maybe you guys can identify this better. Somebody said it was a benitake (red mushroom). Yeah, benitake sounds more natural. So it's poisonous. I thought it was pretty, but I discovered it there. I found this one as well. This one looks really delicious. I think that was poisonous too, but we didn't... I didn't pick it. I didn't pick any of them, but I'm walking the trail and you can find stuff like this. Check this one out here. All right, check this one out here. This is matsutake (pine mushroom), and apparently the guide said that this matsutake, there was a bunch of it there, and I accidentally stepped on it because it's in the middle of the trail. I just didn't see it, and then I broke it. So we left it there, but I think someone is certainly going to pick it up, but he said a bunch of this. These would cost 10,000 yen because it's a rare species that you can eat of maitake (hen-of-the-woods mushroom). It's like, wow. So there's so many mushrooms all over the place in the countryside here.

08:05 John Daub: Let me see if I can show you the breakfast I had this morning. A very typical Japanese breakfast. Yeah, here it is. This is Deguchiya. That's the minpaku (private lodging) that I stayed at. There's, of course, natto (fermented soybeans), and I put that negi (green onion) in the natto. Mixed it up there real good. Some sansai (mountain vegetables), I believe that is. A lot of it is very salty. Some taste, of course, the steaming hot of miso soup. Hot bowl of miso soup really hits the spot on a chilly day like today. There's some Japanese seaweed flavored. One fried egg, and some green tea, which I poured myself with one hand. Careful. And then I found that I didn't put enough leaf in there, so it's not green enough. It was good. It's a kind of a breakfast that you get when you're staying at any place, actually. These aren't just beds and rooms. It's most of the lodges will prepare you a dinner, and you know what? If you look around, there's not exactly a restaurant around here. You don't really have a place to eat. You have what you have, which is the place that you're staying. And it was a home-cooked meal by Fukuhara-san, which is great. The dinner had tempura, and everyone has soba (buckwheat noodles) here, which is so good. Everywhere has soba here. It's just really nice.

09:33 John Daub: They actually have accommodations here. You can see there's a couple of them. The one that I marked here is Fukuhara-san. He's famous for the bear, so I marked it on my Google map as the bear guy. But apparently, there's other places to stay here, and a lot of people that are hiking the Shinetsu Trail, this is the end of Section 9, and Section 10 goes up there, and it stops at the peak, up here, and it's the hardest part of this hike. So a lot of hikers will stay here that are hiking the Shinetsu Trail. It's very interesting. So I'm glad I could hike one of them. One of the places of interest on the map was the Akiyama Old House. I'm going to go and check that out before I go and leave this area. But apparently, you can go in there and take a look at what life was like hundreds of years ago in a Japanese village. And there are museums like that. There are places like this, but this is really authentic. Like, a lot of this stuff is untouched by people because they don't get a lot of visitors here. Look at that. Here's the showroom. It looks like it's the exact way it was 150 years ago during the Edo period. But according to the guide, this town didn't have samurai back in the Edo period. These are the people who set up these towns or villages. They were fleeing the samurai. They were fleeing that life, and they came and they settled here. And that's why a lot of the villagers, they're farmers. They settled. And they're very far off the beaten path. When they had to go to get supplies, they had to walk. And usually they would walk all day, spend the night, get the supplies, and they would walk home. It's freaking far. Some people had horses eventually as time went on in the Meiji period. But in the Edo period, everybody walked here.

11:23 John Daub: So what I'm doing right now in Niigata and the town of Akiyama-go is, I'm working with Japan Long Trail. They invited me out here and said, have you ever done a long trail? I'm like, no. And that's, what's a long trail? And there's an association that has 29 long trails in Japan. A lot of them are pilgrimages. This is stuff like, I didn't even know about Japan Long Trail. Many of them are pilgrimages that have histories of like 1200 years or more. It's like, what? I know about some of them. I think some of you have heard about them, but I didn't know there were 29 of these trails. The Shinetsu is one of them. It connects, it wraps around the border of Nagano and Niigata. So I'm pretty happy to be here. This stream is not sponsored by them or anything, but I was pretty happy to come out here and film this episode. But I got some great drone shots. You have to register your drone with the government of Japan, by the way, before you fly it. I think the US is like that as well. And by the way, start that process before you arrive in Japan, because it can take two weeks to a month to do that. So if you have a drone, you're going to fly it for filming. Make sure you start the process like a month in advance with the serial number of your drone and your address and your passport. You got to send the pictures of all that. It's all done by hand or manually.

12:51 John Daub: Let's go just take a quick look at that water up there. And, you know, my drone's registered and everything like that. But the process, especially if you get a new drone, I was surprised it takes a while. You'll get a registration number that starts with JU right now. It used to be RD, my older drones, but now it's JU. I'm driving a Toyota. Is that a Vitz? It's like the smallest, cheapest, most affordable car. Why would I need more than that? Look at this. It's a city of water. Already the signal's gone bad because I left that spot. Let me go back. See, they're growing negi right up here. Japanese negi. I left that spot and the signal goes down. There's enough signal for you to download like if you wanted to watch a movie or something. But not enough to do a live stream really. This is in 720p, by the way, just out of necessity. Look at that. They solar power some of the construction lights and stuff here. So that's all I really have for you today. Nothing's open yet. Or nothing's open until the weekend on days like this. Maybe I could show you where I am. I think I just did. It's pretty cool. Like you're driving around and you look out the window and you see this. You see these old houses. You see, I guess what it is, the spirit of Japan is really out here. The spirit of Japan is out here. It's not really in Tokyo.

15:02 John Daub: And when you're surrounded by a lot of tourists, I got to be honest with you, it doesn't even feel like home anymore. There was a time, like, there was a time, remember during the pandemic? I think it was like 2021 or something. Peter von Gomm and I were walking around and we made this joke like we don't want you. We're completely joking. 99% of people have a sense of humor. We're like, we don't want you here. We, we, we don't care. We don't, we like it the way it is. But we were actually really lonely. It just was too quiet in Tokyo. But now it's like a part of me is like, I don't know if we should have been. I think we kind of meant it. Maybe not that we don't want you here, but there's like two. It doesn't feel like home anymore. It feels like we're living inside of a tourist attraction inside of Tokyo. That's not a great thing. But I think for other tourists, you want to be out here in a place like this where you can kind of feel the country. And you're not shoulder to shoulder with some person who is, you know, from a neighboring state or a neighboring country of yours back home. I don't know. I just can't feel Japan as much when I walk around. Even Asakusa. This is so much more authentic. It's so much more real. And that's why, like, I don't say not go to Tokyo. But I do think that stopping in Tokyo is a necessity because that's where it is.

16:36 John Daub: I think I forgot to show you this. There's one last thing. All right. I was driving. There's the car. This is so freaking weird. All right. Look at this. This is so freaking weird. So did you see it? You see it? You see it? It's a freaking head, man. It's a freaking head. There's a freaking head. It's a scarecrow. Is this? I mean, I think it's a mannequin, but you can't tell in some places. And we're like not that far from Halloween. It could be something. But it's a head. This is what many of you were waiting for. I'm walking around. I was driving. And I was coming here yesterday. Actually, I was hiking with Suzuki-san to go into the lodge. And I first saw it. And then I had to drive him back to his car. And then I saw it again. And I'm like, oh, my God. And then I really started to see. I got to go check this out and see. Whoever this person is needs the owner of this head needs to wash the head. All right. Or I want to be honest with you. It's a freaking head. That's scary in itself.

18:02 John Daub: But if you look at the head, it's way too cute. The head needs to be hideous. It needs to be. If you want to scare it. Especially if you're a man. Especially people and crows. I would get one of those shrunken heads that they do at the voodoo. I've seen them in the movies. Because this head, it's kind of creepy from a distance. And maybe, you know, but if you're going to put a head on a stake and scare people and things, you're going to want to get somebody who doesn't pluck their eyebrows and stuff. All right. But maybe add some blood splatter. I don't know. But it looks like really cute. Right? Look at the nose. Perky mouth. I think this head has even done makeup. I don't know. I'd get more some scars in there. Zombify it a little bit. What do you guys think? You can tell me in the comments below. Or don't. I'm kind of scared to ask about something like that. This is a tale out of Stephen King. What's going on in some of these village houses? Should I even be here? I should probably leave now. But it's interesting. Thank you, Scott Tan writes in here. It looks like a Stephen King horror scene. It totally does.

19:20 John Daub: All right. That's all I got for you. It's a pretty interesting experience. But Akiyama-go, mission complete with the filming. Katakuri no Yado and that village down there. And now I'm going to go to the Shinkansen station to a supermarket to get some lunch and then to another section of this trail. I spent the night at a soba hotel. It's not a hotel. It's like a soba lounge. The owner makes soba. And there's a bed for me. A warm meal and a bed. And I'm going to hang out there tonight. And then tomorrow I'm going to film some more. I'll do another live stream. And then maybe I'll take you around that area. I don't know. And then I head back to Tokyo and back on the Shinkansen, you know, from here. So from Yuzawa. So that's quite an experience I've had so far. If you have questions, leave them in the comments below. It's just a short story. It's a short one. But it's a neat village. And I would recommend Deguchiya. It feels like you are with a family. You can see like the autumn colors are so close. Saya, do you see that? The autumn colors are so close to changing. There is the start of it. Maybe in a week or 10 days. Because it is cooler now. I think it's going to be real soon. But yeah, leave me a comment if you'd like to see something in Nagano. I'm not going to make it to neighboring prefectures. I'm here just for this. And I'll go back home. But probably will come back here in a week or two to film the foliage. Because it's just stunning. Look at it. Can you feel it? It's like the leaves are just days away. Like maybe a week away from starting to change, really. The process has already started, right? It's already started. But autumn is really close. But it feels like it right now. I got to tell you. It's nice and chilly.

21:32 John Daub: Postcard Club, by the way. The postcards have been sent out. And they should arrive from the Patreon Postcard Club. If you want to get something in your mailbox from Japan with a neat stamp on it every month, sign up for Postcard Club. That's on here too. All right, guys. Take care. I'll see you in another live stream real soon. I got to get out of here before that creepy head comes to life. There's like nothing around. There's a hot spring up here. But there's not much around except for that spider on the dashboard. Hey, buddy. Still a spider. Dude. Small one. Live with nature. That's what I've discovered. This trip has helped me reconnect with nature. And that little spider, I hope I can get him back to his home before I leave here. I'm going to open the door and see if I can usher him out because I like that connection with nature. Try not to kill anything. Don't take more than you need. Just balance and you find happiness. That's what it's all about. Maybe. What the heck do I know? See you guys. Bye.