00:00:01 John Daub: Hey everybody, welcome to Tokyo Station. This is the south—minami—exit of Tokyo Station on the Marunouchi side, not the Yaesu side. And you can see over my shoulder is where they have Tokyo's eki stamp (station stamp). Eki stamp in Japanese. It's a station stamp, and this is the best free souvenir that you could get traveling around Japan. And it's another reason why you should leave the city of Tokyo, maybe explore other areas, because the eki stamp is just such a cool thing.

00:00:32 John Daub: I haven't been live streaming for a while. We had a loss in the family. It's been a tough time. But doing these live streams is a way for me to build up my energy again, a lot of positive vibes from our audience here. So I want to say thank you to everybody who's been a part of the community supporting through this tough time.

00:00:48 John Daub: Anyways, I'm going to show you where—you can see the post box is still over my shoulder right there. We're going to go over there. I'm going to show you what the stamp is for Tokyo, as well as some of the other options. Now, eki stamps are so cool. This is just a couple of screenshots that I took from the internet. A lot of people do carry books and they travel around Japan with these books. And wherever you go, you're going to see these, not just in the stations. You'll see them in the subways, at hotels, at tourist attractions. And you're going to have a really amazing collection.

00:01:18 John Daub: I think it looks a lot cooler if you don't have it one by one like this. I think it's cooler if you have it on like a notebook, a book sheet like this. And then you put them all side by side. But some of the stamps can be extraordinarily large. And you have to actually physically be there in order to get the stamps. And that's what makes these eki stamps so cool. They have different colors to them, different styles.

00:01:41 John Daub: This one at Jimbocho Station in Tokyo, outside of the metro—Toei Shinjuku Line, I believe. It's really cool because it gives you the culture of the area in which you're in, the cityscape of it all. It's famous for its publishing houses, Shueisha. Oh, it's also where there's a lot of outdoor shops—Ogawamachi and Jimbocho Kanda-shita, down that street. A lot of outdoor shops. Maybe that's putting it in the culture. And then you've got some salaryman there. It's a really cool thing. Totally free. You never pay for these types of things.

00:02:21 John Daub: The books kind of look like this. You can get these on the internet—Amazon sells them. You know, I was thinking maybe I better—I should make an Only in Japan version of this, right? Maybe I'm going to do that. Ellis, David, let's work on this. We can get maybe 100 or 200 made and then see if these take off.

00:02:42 John Daub: But if you're coming here to visit Tokyo, that's such a cool thing to go around and see these stamps here. Most of the stamp stations will look like this. They're just made out of wood. They're hard. They're easy to miss. But you could see that little well? There's usually a stamp chained to it because you don't want people walking off with the stamps. But get that stamp. You can just stamp your book. Get some ink.

00:03:10 John Daub: I've noticed that some travelers actually travel with ink. And some of these are in really remote places. And the ink is too dried up. And they'll replace the ink. I've seen Japanese travel around with bottles of ink—like really little ones. You can get them at the Daiso at the 100-yen shop. And then you can put red ink and black ink and blue ink. Those are the three most standard ones. Because if it's a green ink one, you don't want to put black ink in there. But travel with more than one different color of ink to make sure that the ink's there. Because the worst thing would be you get to that location and the ink is gone.

00:03:45 John Daub: Willem, I'm actually here for you, brother. You're the one who told me about the Tokyo Station one. It's been a while. I'm sorry that it's taken so long. But the Tokyo Station is really nice. This is your postcard right here. So the stamp's going on it. I put it already on there. I'm going to put it in the box. I'll send you a video of that. And my friend Tom in London, he's getting a postcard from us to say Happy New Year with a stamp on it as well. So, Willem, you brought me here because you couldn't get the Skytree one. So I put one from this actual place, one of the eki stamps.

00:04:20 John Daub: So let's go check out the Tokyo Station eki stamp version of it right now. So as you can see, a lot of tourists do know about these. Good to see you're back. Yes, it was a tough couple of days there. So this is the eki stamp here. It says the nengajo (New Year's card). So you can put your nengajo in here as well. I'm going to put this in here just to say goodbye to them so they're on the way.

00:05:04 John Daub: I got a piece of paper here. If you don't have an eki stamp book, usually you just get a piece of paper and you can stamp it. It says Higashi for JR Higashi Nihon, I guess. This thing has been stamped like a million times. It's so run down. Tokyo Station. It says on the right side, Tokyo Eki Higashi. That's really cool. It's supposed to look like that. The second one's okay. It's getting low on ink. So this would go in your stamp book. And this is the top of the Marunouchi Station. It's very cool.

00:06:19 John Daub: The more you travel around Japan, the more you go to the countryside, the more you're going to find these really unique ones that are just super cool to collect. And you will start to have a book with all of these really cool ones here. Oh, there's one at the Tocho right there, the blue one. That's from the Shinjuku building. There's one I think at the cat shrine. The monorail in Chiba. There's Chiba Station on the top left. That's so cool. Ueno Zoo. Ueno Station has the panda, which they no longer have. Yeah, there's a lot of really good ones. It's a lot of fun.

00:07:01 John Daub: So if you're coming to Japan, this is one of my big pieces of advice to you. It's something that I started really late in my career as a traveler around Japan, but having that stamp book will pay off. You don't have to get anything special. You can just get a little book. You kind of have an idea of what the size is now, right? If you can get a book, I think four to a page, but if you open it up and you see eight of them, it's really cool to look at. It's basically like passport stamps, right?

00:07:26 John Daub: I got a passport with 100 pages. I had two amendment books added into my passport in 2002 and 2003 when I backpacked around the world. I think I filled up 100 pages with passport stamps, and there's like in and outs, in and outs, in and outs. There must have been, over the course of the 10 years, like 300 or 400 passport stamps. It's so cool. Panama has one of the... Australia had a pretty cool stamp, too. A lot of them did. And then the one-sheet visa stamps. This is kind of the same principle. When you get to a place, you can stamp it with the seal, and it's like a stamp. It's like you've been there, because you literally have to be on the spot in order to get that stamp. You have to be here, unless you do it for Willem in the Netherlands, which I'm glad to do.

00:08:21 John Daub: This is inside of Marunouchi Station— one of the most beautiful stations. Kind of patterned after Central Station in Amsterdam. I've said that like a thousand times, but it's just so beautiful. They've renovated the inside of it, painted it up. There's a net to keep the pigeons and the birds out. And the crows and the other birds to go inside of there. You can see the net now. 1912, I believe, it was finished, this station.

00:09:02 John Daub: In the North Station, I don't think there's a ticket window, a midori mado (green window), right over there. They have one in the South, but not in the North. And then this is the Tokyo Station Hotel banquet and restaurant. It's a pretty good place. There's some tourists right over there. They're stamping. They know about it. And now you do too.

00:09:54 John Daub: I didn't notice this. Tokyo Station has an accessibility waiting room. So if you have a wheelchair, it's quite crowded in certain areas. You can just wait in here for a couple of hours. You push the button, there's an intercom, and they will let you in according to the sign there. This is in the South entrance of the station. It's called the Marunouchi. It's very cool. Tokyo Station has modernized. There's toilets on the outside as well. And there's the box right there. So you have to exit out of the station and make a quick left in your bento? It is a beautiful station.

00:10:40 John Daub: Now, for those people who want to go to the post office, and I very often go across the street here to the International Post Office. Actually, all the post offices are international, but back in the day, I guess in the 70s, 80s, if you wanted to send anything abroad, you had to go to a specialized international post office. And this was that place that can do more. The Kitei Building is no longer just this white building. They built a skyscraper in back of it. That is an amazing view platform to see the trains on the Shinkansen. You can go up there on the seventh floor. There's somebody up there now. Get a picture. But you can get some cool stamps.

00:11:28 John Daub: The other reason I'm coming here is not just for the eki stamps. And sorry, it took a little bit of time to do that. I'm also going to this post office to get the Pandoro stamps for January. So if you're a Patreon member, January stamps, or February. I'm not sure if I'll put which one. We'll have the Pandoro, which is the Japanese manga—or is it anime? I'm not sure. Bakery robber. It's really cool. They have this like baked Japanese bakery items on the stamps. And the Pandoro is on it. And that's a kid... The kids love that. But they have the Pandoro stamps. I'm hoping that they've got like two, three hundred of them. So I'll be able to put them on the postcards for next month.

00:12:21 John Daub: All right, everybody. That's all I got for you. It's been a couple of days. We had a tough loss. I'll probably explain a little bit more about it to our Patreon supporters. I don't want to get too much into it. Because it's a tough season. I was supposed to—we were supposed to be in the United States. We had to cancel our flights because of a loss in the family. I'll just leave it at that. And we're going to go back to the U.S. at the end of the month. So it's a much shorter visit to see family. But you got to roll with it. We're put through challenges in life all the time. And you have to bend without breaking. And this is the time of year where a lot of people are doing a lot of bending, if you know what I mean.

00:13:08 John Daub: If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below. I really do appreciate it. And I'll see you in the next live stream. As I take you maybe to some of the Christmas markets here. Actually, last night we went to a Christmas market at Shiba Park in front of Tokyo Tower. It was good. And I got a chance to see Richard who's visiting Japan as well yesterday. I'm talking with him for an hour—an hour and a half or so. Amazing view from one of the hotels. Sat down and had a drink for an hour and a half. It's nice to be able to catch up with some of you when you do visit Japan. But Richard, if you're watching, I want to say thank you to you and Ray for just being good friends.

00:13:49 John Daub: All right, guys. Take care. I'll see you in another episode soon. You get a nice view of the taxis. You know, in a couple of—not too long from now, there's going to be a new tower right there. The Torch Tower is going to be right there. Mata ne. Mata ne. Mata ne.