00:00:01 John Daub: 2:46 PM, 2011. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Every year this day comes up. It's the anniversary, at a time where I sort of reflect. We're almost 15 years exactly to that time where it happened. I was here in Tokyo, and right away I knew that this is a really big earthquake. This was not something that was typical — I think within the first two seconds, because yeah, I've been living in Japan for since 1998. I've been through a lot of earthquakes. But that day, that earthquake in particular, was just — you just knew something was wrong right away. A lot of people that I talked to since then that were here felt the same way.

00:00:34 John Daub: And in this episode I want to recount to you some of the things that I remember from 15 years ago. Some of the things that changed me, changed Tokyo, changed my friends, and changed Japan maybe forever. This is one of those once in a lifetime, once in a generation, once every hundred year kind of an earthquake events. I know that the media always talks about there's going to be another big one, and they very well could be another very big catastrophic earthquake in Japan. But this one really did occur, and it's in the past, and however, it probably will live with me for the rest of my life because when you go through an earthquake, it's not just the earthquake, but everything that happens after it.

00:01:09 John Daub: The chain reaction, to where we are now 15 years later — it again, it seems like yesterday. And I want to talk about that. I'll look at the livestream chat and try to answer some of your questions about it, as well as show you some of the things that I've learned and that I also put on YouTube, the main channel, including a simulation of that exact same earthquake. And my feelings after feeling it again — maybe I think it was about 10 years after the earthquake, which is still very traumatic for those that are watching.

00:01:42 John Daub: You know, these livestreams can be hard, and I apologize if I get a little emotional because I do have still a little bit of issues talking about that day. But I was in Tokyo, and it was not nearly as bad as it was up in Tohoku, the epicenter here. If you could take a look at this really quickly. I want to give you just an idea how massive this earthquake was. Before I'd come to Japan, the biggest earthquake that people were still talking about in 1998 was this one. This is the great — I guess you call it the Kobe earthquake, the Hanshin earthquake of 1995. Sorry. It was a really big earthquake, but you could see seismically, the intensity was mostly focused right there in Hyogo Prefecture, around Osaka, the Kansai region, a little bit up in Tokyo — they might not have felt it too much.

00:02:26 John Daub: It was also very, very early in the morning, which is some of the most dangerous earthquakes that happen when you're sleeping because your reaction times are not very good. Not that you really have a lot of time to react in an earthquake anyways. But this was the 1995 earthquake, the one that everybody talked about. And then 2011 — I want you to see just how massive this one is here. The entire country of Japan felt it in one way or another. Maybe not to a massive degree down in Kagoshima, but it was picked up as far west and southwest as Kagoshima. And you see Hokkaido up in the north — it really felt this. And the whole Kanto region, from Tohoku and Kanto really felt it. We're looking at like six on the Japanese intensity scale. Japan doesn't do magnitude. They do intensity of the shaking. And seven is catastrophic.

00:03:25 John Daub: And you see a seven there. That is awful to have to go through. You cannot stand up. You're going to see this in a second here. The reach of this earthquake was extraordinary. And it was — I just wanted you to see this before we go into it. And I'm going to talk to you about also the American response, what my options were, what I lived through, the aftermath of my apartment and the city of Tokyo in particular, because this is the environment that I'm in, the city of Tokyo. So it was 2:46 PM, 18 seconds. They have it, I've written it down here. It was a magnitude 9. I think they put it up at a 9.1. And originally it was like an 8.7. It doesn't really matter.

00:04:15 John Daub: It was massive. All right. The depth was 29 kilometers, which is quite — I guess it's quite deep. 130 kilometers from Sendai. That's quite out into the Pacific Ocean. But the impact was just such a massive amount of energy. It shook the entire entirety, as I showed you, of that part of the east coast of Japan. It was just — you couldn't get away from it. I was at my desk, I was editing videos. I was doing something similar to what I'm doing now, but I was doing educational videos for teaching Japanese and English. I was number one on iTunes, by the way — not that that's I guess sort of a big deal, but video podcasts. At the time I was the number one video podcaster in Japan, more than the Prime Minister. I am kind of proud of that. But it got me into debt because you can't — you know, this is before the world of influencers and stuff. And that was my attempt.

00:05:22 John Daub: But anyways, I was hard at work at that. And I was at my desk, and you're just sitting down, and you could — I guess it's a P-wave they call it. I felt something in the beginning, and it just didn't feel right. And I stood up. And then the S-waves — I think it's the S of the P-waves — I felt the next thing. I think about two, three seconds, you just knew: this is massive. You couldn't really stand up. I was holding onto the doorway, and I remember looking outside. It's — you just can't — you can't stand up. I'm looking outside, and you're swaying as though you're on a boat. It's the most surreal feeling because you're in a stationary building which is not supposed to move, and you're moving. You look outside, everything's going like this, all right? Everything's going like this. The buildings that are next to me, they're oscillating too. And it's just — it's surreal. You're a deer in a headlight, really.

00:06:21 John Daub: You just can't move because you don't know what to do. I probably have a better idea, having been to the Bosei Disaster Center, talking with the fire department, making episodes on this. But still, when it happens, you just really don't know what to do. And you think you can just run outside, right? But you can't even stand up. So trying to get outside, to go outdoors, go down the steps — I timed it, it would have taken me 15 seconds to get to the ground level. And by that time, you're in the middle of a really dangerous earthquake. Things can be collapsing onto you. So it's best to just stay put, get underneath the table, get into the bathtub, I guess stay in the doorways, and just ride it out, because that's — that's all you really can do.

00:07:03 John Daub: And then you have an emergency bag where you can jet when everything simmers down. But even then, you have to be careful of things falling down on top of you. So the earthquake seemed to go on for like ever. It really did seem to go on like forever. It felt like that too. There's a couple of videos here. I want to show it to you on the other side. This is an AP video from 2011. You can see raw footage. Why this is good is you could see the intensity of it here, right? You can see that it's just like everything — things are just falling off here. You can't — you can't stop that desk from toppling over. You can't — it's very hard. They're doing their very best, but you can't stand up unless you're — your thing — a video camera's there. Unless you're holding on to something. It's worse than riding on — try standing on like a bus or public transportation. It's incredible the amount of power. You don't know what to do. Your whole world around you is moving in the — the intensity of it is just — it's just crazy.

00:08:20 John Daub: I think this was Naoto Kan, wasn't it? Maybe he was the Prime Minister at the time. Here's the NHK office shaking violently. The things falling off of the ceiling. It's — there's no way you can prepare for something like this. And you can't escape it. You can't outrun it. It's outside, it's everywhere. These footage — you just have to ride it out. It's really crazy. And this is in Tokyo. I found this one YouTuber video. It's crazy because it only has 77,000 views. But you can see this — this one guy, I think he might be a resident of Japan. The intensity inside of Tokyo was crazy. Here he is in Shibuya. I'm just gonna fast forward through this. The intensity in Japan felt really crazy too. Although we're quite a ways away from Sendai, the whole world around you is shaking massively.

00:09:19 John Daub: You know, this before you — you come to Japan as a tourist, right? I'm going to talk about this next, so I'm going to pause it here and we're going to go back to it. For those that are looking right now, NHK has a really great page on remembering 3/11 and the first video here on NHK is the live broadcast. And oh my goodness, the Tokyo studio is moving. It's shaking and they — you know how scary it is. They just kept broadcasting. They just kept broadcasting. "Please go to a safe spot." They're talking about fires, the intensity in different places of it. I remember I turned on the TV right away after this happened. I had to pick it up off of the ground.

00:10:12 John Daub: The first thing you did was we turned on NHK and you could see the studio. They're just — the reporters are just super, super calm, the ones that are reporting on this. Before I go into the next part of this, I want to just finish up on what was happening here in Tokyo. Okay, so we have the big earthquake. I'm freaked out. I'm cleaning up stuff that has fallen onto the ground. There's a lot of stuff. Let me see if I can pull up some photos here. Maybe I have it. There's a lot of stuff that has fallen onto the ground in my apartment. It is a complete and utter disaster. Everything — everything is on the ground. Everything is — I have some photos. I actually had to go into my Facebook and pull this off of an account. I rarely use Facebook, but it's become like an archive of stuff that happened so very long ago. Broken wine glasses, TV toppled over, clothing that was in drawers — the drawers had fallen onto the ground of the tatami room that I lived in. And just everything was all over the place.

00:11:34 John Daub: It wasn't as bad because I didn't have that much stuff, to be honest with you, but I did have to clean up a lot of glass in the kitchen, and that was hard. So after I'd done that, we had a second earthquake — it was an aftershock. It was a really big one. There were some — a couple of small ones, I believe. But then a big aftershock hit, and it felt almost — it felt almost as strong as the original earthquake. By that time, I had gathered my senses, and I grabbed my hamster — I had a hamster named Kiki — and I put her in my pocket right here. I'm not joking. I ran outside, and I ran to the park, and there was a park nearby, which is where you're supposed to go. And there were a bunch of other residents there, other Japanese there, and we were just talking about what had happened. Is this going to — you know, is the aftershocks going to keep going? Nobody really knew because even the Japanese had never really lived through an earthquake this big in Tokyo.

00:12:36 John Daub: We had one in Kobe, I showed you, but nobody really knew what was going on. This is before Fukushima, the meltdown, the tsunami. All right? We didn't really know that tsunami was coming. We just know that there were warnings — there are warnings after every earthquake almost that's really big off of the coast, of a tsunami coming. So a lot of people — don't — we've had so many warnings without a tsunami really coming. That was devastating — that people took it for granted back then. We didn't — you don't see it, you don't know for sure. We have the warnings, but people didn't — you know, we haven't heard of anybody who lost their life in a tsunami since the one before. This was the Boxing Day earthquake in Indonesia, where the tsunami took a lot of people's lives all the way as far as India, as well as in Phuket. We had a lot of tourists. I remember seeing the video and the documentaries on that. That that tsunami took a lot of lives, and this one was just as powerful and took a lot of lives in the — because people were not prepared for it.

00:13:47 John Daub: So in Tokyo, after the aftershock — after the first one, I have to be honest with you, after the first one, there were some massive problems in the city of Tokyo. Train stopped. All trains stopped. And I couldn't make phone calls. I was calling my friends. I wanted to call my family. The Internet seemed to be okay. We were able — I was able to log on and get stuff, but I think I'm like an iPhone 5. All right? We're talking 2011. It was like — I think it was like an iPhone 4 or 5 I had at the time. It wasn't exactly, you know, Internet wasn't exactly like it is today. Wi-Fi and all of this stuff — you know, it was in the early — not in the early days, but it wasn't — it was like somewhere in between. It wasn't very fast, and it wasn't — the websites weren't extremely great at the time. So we could get information from the websites, but TV was still a better source of information back then.

00:14:42 John Daub: I couldn't get through on the phone. I tried calling a lot of Japanese friends. The — the reason why I learned — we learned later was because telephone calls were — the cell towers were overrun with telephone usage, and they had the cell phone carriers had shut down 90% of it so that that could be used for emergency responders. So there was a very limited amount of data for cellular data available for phone calls for people. So you had loved ones — you know, in Saitama, in Kanagawa, in Chiba — trying to call their husbands and wives that might be working in the city of Tokyo, or vice versa, at home, trying to find out that everybody is okay. You just couldn't get through. The telephones were down for many hours in that day, March 11, 2011. So the infrastructure was overrun with phone calls, and I couldn't get through to anybody.

00:15:43 John Daub: I was — we didn't — I don't think we had Line back then, or I wasn't using it. That's the WhatsApp app at the time. I think maybe it was a Facebook Messenger or something. I forget how we were. Even the messages weren't going through too, too well. But through the Internet voice chats, you were able to get some information through. But I remember I couldn't get through to friends to make sure that they were okay, which worried me. Facebook became a very important place to mark off and let people know that you were okay. Because despite the fact that Tokyo — we didn't really have loss of life — a lot of people abroad were quite worried about me. And the messages that I received from people was off the charts. This is before I was on YouTube — so this before Only in Japan.

00:16:31 John Daub: So you have a lot of office workers. I'm lucky. I was fortunate. I was at home — I was already home. A lot of people weren't. There's millions of people who commute into Tokyo. Millions. And there were no trains. There were taxis, but the taxis really couldn't go anywhere either because there was traffic. I think there's a photo. Let me see if I can find it. There's a photo I want to show you. And it — I think it does a pretty good job of showing you what the situation was like in Tokyo. People had to walk home as far as 20, 25 kilometers. Sorry, I was off a little bit. People had to walk home as far as 20 to 25 kilometers in order to get back home. And it wasn't an easy walk either because it was really filled with a lot of people. It was really — well, there's a lot of traffic here. Let me see if I can bring this photo up here, folks. A lot of them — I think I might have it on the Internet. I think that that photo did a really good job of showing what it was like that day.

00:17:34 John Daub: Check it out. There it is. So iPhone wants to go in — this is from 2011. It's a pretty famous photo. You can see the traffic jams are pretty intense. People were walking on the roads because the cars weren't really going anywhere. But on the left side, you can see the walkers trying to get back home, going to Saitama. I believe this is going towards Saitama. It was really intense. There's millions of people that have a story about that day. So when I often ask "Where were you?" — I meet people sometimes, if it's close to the anniversary, I'll ask them, "Where were you that day?" And usually people have a story. And a lot of people — it's this. The walk back was really intense. People just trying to get back to see their loved ones. The convenience stores were packed with people. They ran out of food at the convenience stores.

00:18:22 John Daub: Let me see if I have a couple of photos. I actually took a trip to go to Osaka a little bit later on. I'll talk about that in a second. But if you went in the convenience stores, this is what I saw here. I took one photo of it. I was like, "Okay, this is — this is actually a few days later too." Just one sandwich there. The supply chains broke down. So in Tokyo we had — we have people that just couldn't get home, but we also couldn't get food and we couldn't get water. And in Tokyo you could see a lot of people had just taken the water — bottled stuff. There was imported water. Prices weren't gouged or anything like that. But like everything was gone, and they couldn't restock it fast enough. But they ran out of stock. So we didn't have water. We didn't have new food coming in because trucks couldn't get in.

00:19:03 John Daub: A lot of stuff was coming from Tohoku. And in Tokyo, all right, we didn't have — you could go to the supermarket and you could try to get stuff, but the shelves were bare. Not because people had bought everything. Not just because of that. They couldn't stock it because trucks from Tohoku couldn't get through the Tohoku highway. Because that highway — I think it was the Joban Expressway — it's a massive, massive route to get goods and services in, as well as the train lines. The local train lines were just wiped out. The Joban Line was wiped out in places up in Fukushima and Miyagi from the tsunami. So Tokyo stores for days didn't have stuff in there. It was crazy. So you had what you had, and I luckily had some food and water. The tap water was fine until it wasn't. Right. That's another story.

00:19:50 John Daub: So now I can go back and show you a little bit about what it felt like that day. Tokyo. This is Shibuya Station. It was just — and there were aftershocks going on like every five minutes, by the way. It was just everybody out on the street, people not sure what to do. And look at my video — is the one that suggested up at the top here, people didn't know what to do. All right. They're just after the big earthquake. Do you wait for the trains? Will the trains restart? Should we stick around and wait for the train? Well, it's a 20-kilometer train ride to go home. I'm not going to walk it. Well, around — you know, it happened at 2:46. So around 4:00, people are like, "We're just going to walk it. I'll walk the line and if it starts, I can go to the local train station en route and then take the train from there." And people ended up walking all the way home. The Yamanote Line apparently came back online around 4 in the morning the next day. So people tried their very best to get home that day.

00:20:43 John Daub: People did sleep in their offices. There were some people that ended up doing that. But you know, I was at home. I eventually got through to several of my friends. All of them were walking home. All of them were walking home. One of them quite a long ways — I think about 20 kilometers. One of my friends actually walked to my house. I had a house guest that night, sleeping on the floor, just because it was — I think it was like a four or five kilometer walk here. But to get back to Chiba would have been a lot further. And I said, "Well, just crash here." It's — you got to help out your neighbors, help out people. When you have this kind of a disaster, that's all you can do. So let's look back at what happened. I picked up my TV, and after that aftershock, I went back home. And then we started to see this — we get updates about what's happening here. Then we started getting helicopter footage of the tsunami coming in, of that tsunami coming and racing in.

00:21:42 John Daub: And we're seeing live shots of Japanese drivers going the wrong way. And you see the helicopter showing the tsunami wave, you know, this big black water pushing forward through the farm fields. And they're in a car, and they're going right into it. There's just no escape for them. I remember that we're all watching this live on TV, okay, all throughout Japan. This is — this is what we can do. You can't go outside. You can't really do much of anything. And we're watching Tohoku — Fukushima, where I used to live, just completely destroyed by this. The stories that I heard afterwards — I try not to erase it from my mind as much as possible on this day, but they well up, and it's hard. And I might try to share one of them with you because I think if you feel it, then you remember it too, which is good to do when you come to visit Japan.

00:22:30 John Daub: But the amount of destruction from the tsunami was just extraordinary. And we didn't have this in Tokyo. We had other issues going on. But this was — I guess a few hours afterwards, around 4 o'clock, we started to really see these waves. This is 3:50, according to the timestamp here. This is Miyagi Natori City. 3:58 PM, this broadcast started. And you can see — yeah, I remember this footage, the helicopter footage. You can see there's a highway there following the tsunami. Oh, look at that. That's awful. Here you could see the wave just coming in and starting to take over fields. This mud and debris took over Sendai Airport, and it also took over the highway and the train lines, and it just made them inoperable. So people who were in these areas were isolated. A lot of these towns were isolated because nobody could go in or out. This is a situation and there's a mass — I think that's the highway right there. And there's a tsunami wave coming right for it.

00:23:28 John Daub: And you know, you have the helicopter operator going through the smoke here, probably toxic stuff. And this was — the whole country was gripped on watching this on TV. Then we started to get information on Fukushima, on the nuclear power plant and what was happening there. There it is right there. The first — this is not a great place to be. Of Tomioka — their live footage. This is at 4:30 PM, just a couple of hours — where Netflix did a good job of bringing this to a dramatized version of it, showing the heroes of that day. And there were so many of them. But this is when everything just changed. Okay. This got — it wasn't just an earthquake and a tsunami. It became a lot more than that. And as somebody living here, this is where the story takes a dark turn that we sometimes forget on this day where it all started.

00:24:17 John Daub: The damage from the tsunami was — then we're looking at this as well. More tsunamis start hitting the country here. Look at that. And we're in Tokyo. We're still feeling, by the way, when we're watching this, our houses are shaking in Tokyo. We have so many aftershocks. Every five minutes there's an aftershock. Okay. It really does feel like you're on a boat. So you're watching this in your house and we're all feeling aftershocks, just wondering if another big one is going to be coming. You don't know what to do here. I just wanted to go and try to help these people. You don't know — there's nothing you can do. When we watch it here — 6 o'clock from Shibuya. It's just a big, big human traffic jam in the city of Tokyo. People don't know what to do. How are you going to get home? You can't call — well, everyone's trying to call their family and they can't get through.

00:25:02 John Daub: And they don't know if they should stay and wait for the trains to restart or go. A lot of people just probably sat down and ended up sleeping outside. Well, here's the deal. I remember this very, very vividly that day. The weather was sunny. I remember there were long shadows of the buildings because we're getting in a late afternoon — sunset is around 5, around 6 o'clock. It's 6:06 here, so it's dark in the NHK video. The temperature was about 13, 14 degrees Celsius. So that's like maybe 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But once the sun set, the temperature started to dip real fast, real cold. It was a chilly, chilly day, chilly, chilly night. And in fact the weeks after it got really cold. We have these periods where the weather gets warm and then it gets really cold like winter. And then it gets — warm again in — like this until spring breaks, and then it's warm. Every day it feels like spring.

00:25:53 John Daub: So we were at that warm cycle, and then that day on March 11, it just seemed to get really cold. I think we had snow up in Tohoku. People that were walking home — see here, people that are walking home. You could see your breath when you were walking home. I remember friends telling me how cold it was. They would blow out and see their breath because of the chill in the air. So there's a lot of people walking home unprepared because they thought they were going to be commuting on a train going back. They don't have the jacket on. They don't have gloves. Warmth enough to even walk home. And imagine what it must be like in Tohoku too. Certainly more so.

00:26:31 John Daub: I can zoom this in a little bit. You can see this on the NHK website. Actually, it's a good thing to kind of relive but to recount. But Shibuya Station and Shinjuku Station were really just mass confusion. The railways didn't even know what to do. This was an — it was an odd thing to have all railways shut down. People walked home in the cold. A lot of people were sharing jackets, hand in hand. This is something that I've noticed in the — in all the Naked Man festivals that I did. When tragedy hits, we all kind of come together here in Japan. All impacted by the same thing. Everybody around you is impacted. So you share what you have with everybody. Just to get through the day here — just to get through the night. It was freezing cold. I remember that too. It was pretty mild that day. Then it got freezing. Right.

00:27:18 John Daub: And it was even colder up in Tohoku. And these people — they didn't have their homes anymore. A lot of them. So they had to go to these evacuation centers. Kita Senju Station was equally overcrowded. Yeah — every station was. And the further away you were from home, the worse off it was for you. Because there's no hotels, there's nowhere you can go, really. You had to stay with friends or stay at the office. Not a lot of solutions. But people just wanted to go home. I have to be honest with you. You couldn't call your loved ones. You just wanted to go home. You couldn't — you couldn't do anything but just start walking. And the further away you lived, the worse off it was.

00:27:52 John Daub: I don't think a lot of people came into work the next day. That had to do that walk. That was a tough, tough walk. But we got through that day, and the days after it got really, really rough. I remember this — this is outside my apartment. Just — I can kind of bring it up to you. I was just — I'd seen kids practicing this before, but a lot of the kids have these soft hoods that they wear when earthquakes happen to protect them from falling objects. I'm not sure if it's enough to really protect them. It's not quite a helmet, but you see this in the disaster time. And you could see they're wearing jackets. That's — it was starting to get chilly. And the park on the left side, you see up there, there are people there. That's where I evacuated to that day.

00:28:30 John Daub: I didn't take a lot of photos that day, but that was one of them. I think it was about maybe 10 days later, I started getting seasick. I just had to get out of Tokyo now. There were options to leave Tokyo, actually. All of my friends that were from France — and actually I had a lot of friends from France and from Europe, Germany too — they left. They left Japan. Like all the French friends left because they got a free flight to go back home. Like the French government gave them these free flights. Germany too, because of the risk of radiation. And I want to show you some stuff here. I found these links from the US Embassy at the time.

00:29:05 John Daub: Here, see if I pulled this up here. This is the evacuation notice for Americans here. And it wasn't very good. The French citizens all got free — not all of them, but most of them got really highly discounted flights or free flights because of the radiation issues. This is where the story starts to get dark. Because of what happened in Fukushima, we didn't know what was really going on because information was sketchy. A lot of people weren't really trusting NHK at the time because it's a state-run network — they're probably sugarcoating it, you know. So among all my Japanese friends, we want to believe what we're hearing, but we kind of don't. We just — not sure. Amazon.co.jp was still kind of more of a book sales store here than it was selling goods. Geiger counters were one of the things that everyone was buying. I didn't get one. I didn't really have a lot of money then, but to — waste on something. But it didn't seem like a waste after, you know, a few weeks when panic got pretty bad.

00:30:01 John Daub: But there were explosions at the Daiichi plant in Fukushima. And those explosions sent out clouds of smoke. A lot of them settling in Edogawa. At least that's what we were hearing. A lot of that settling in Chiba. A lot of them settling in the — I think it was the Kanayama water plant. I'm just talking from memory here, where we weren't — we were told not to drink the tap water. And that was my — that was where I was getting the water in Edogawa. I think it was Kanayama. Kanayama, right. Water treatment plant. They said don't drink the tap water. You couldn't get bottled water. So — you know, I think I kept drinking the water. To be honest with you, I can't remember. But I don't know if that lasted for very long.

00:30:41 John Daub: But the US Embassy had evacuations, flights, but they weren't very good. Not like the French. We called the people who left that day "fly gaijin" — like gaijin. We called them fly gaijin because they just flew away. They were gone. And Japanese citizens and a lot of other nationalities couldn't do it. There were no flights going out of Narita. Everything was booked or full. This is before the tourism boom, so there weren't as many flights as there are now. You couldn't get out. I thought about it, but I also didn't have the money to waste on a flight to go home and then come back. You don't know what's happening. So I decided to just stay with a lot of my other friends. And most of my friends were Japanese. They couldn't go anywhere. So why would I leave? You know, this is my home. If anything, this is the time where they probably need me the most. Right? There's something I can do to help. At least that's what I was thinking at the time.

00:31:37 John Daub: But I remember going onto the website and I saw the announcement, and this is what the US Embassy had for us. We had — the US Embassy in Tokyo informs US Citizens in Japan who wish to depart. The Department of State is making arrangements to provide transportation to destinations in East Asia outside Japan — not to the US, to other East Asian countries. US Law requires that we bill all passengers for the transportation assistance provided through the US Government. Just keep that in mind, because now we have something going on in Iran where I think that the US citizens there might be in a similar kind of a situation. They're supposed to pay for their flights.

00:32:16 John Daub: US Citizens who traveled on US Government-arranged transport will be expected to make their own onward travel plans from their arrival point. You didn't know if you got this flight, you didn't know where you were going. But when I talked to other Americans, they told me that the flights were $3,000 and you were routed on military transport flights through Taiwan. And it was like a 33-hour flight to get back to the United States, and you didn't know what city you were going to. From there you'd have to get a flight from the city you were flying into to wherever you considered your home. It's not like the French who got like special flights to go back home for free, probably with the taxi included. I'm not sure what their deals were. But a lot of the French that left didn't come back, I noticed. So they got a lot of them got the nickname Fly Gaijin, which I guess that word is somewhat forgotten. Those who were there at the day might remember.

00:33:06 John Daub: Flights began departing Tokyo on Thursday, March 17. US Government-arranged transport will be available at Tokyo's Narita Airport on the Friday the 15th. So the US Embassy did have something, but it wasn't really great. Immediate family members, spouses and children who are not US Citizens must be documented for entry into their destination country. These are like — this was the US equivalent of the evacuation notice. The flights costed between $2,503 and $500 — I think $2,500 to $3,000. And again, you were routed — you didn't know where you were going when you got on these flights. Most of them went through Taipei, which is deemed to be a safe place from the radiation. But at this time, a lot of people were just panicking. You have to remember we're hearing all of this information, we're just kind of panicking.

00:33:53 John Daub: This came from — I think it was from the ambassador, April 8th. So we're almost like a month out of this here. As a precautionary measure, the US Embassy is continuing to make potassium iodide tablets available to private US citizens who have not been able to obtain it from their physician, employer, or other sources. We do not recommend that anyone should take the KI at this time. There are risks associated with taking care. So this is like something you would take if you are exposed to radiation because we didn't know — people were getting this stuff in case there was — all of a sudden news. So we weren't — we weren't really trustful of what the media was telling us in Japan. Basically nobody knew what was actually going on at Fukushima, and we just didn't trust anything. So people were taking precautions, and the embassy was giving out these tablets and telling you not to take — it was a very weird time.

00:34:46 John Daub: Allotments of KI tablets were provided only upon presentation of a valid US passport. Only Americans got these. If you do not, you couldn't get them in Japan and they weren't available anymore. They're all gone. Allotment of tablets have also been made available to US Citizens for his or her non-citizen immediate family members. I was not married at the time. No — did I have a son and daughter — but I can imagine this is on the mind of everybody. Each family member, age 18 and over, must appear in person and sign a liability waiver form in order to receive their allotment. This — very sobering times in Japan at this point.

00:35:22 John Daub: I'm glad that you're here with us. I want to finish this cast, but I'm in a lot of pain. See you in your next video. Please take care. Sorry to hear that. We didn't know — we didn't know we're getting on the ground in Japan in the weeks and months that followed in 2011. First of all, this is right before the cherry blossoms. All cherry blossom festival festivities were canceled. You can't cancel what nature's doing. So they're out there, but — this, the country's in like a point of mourning. So in 2011, no cherry blossom festivals, nobody drinking underneath the trees. They were empty, quiet. It wasn't that they were blocked off. It was that the Japanese public just did not want to show any kind of joy or happiness. There's nothing to be happy about.

00:36:03 John Daub: This is the whole country. There is this amazing amount of unity. And the last time I saw something like this was in 2001 when the attack happened in New York. You saw the United States — this amazing amount of kind of unity. I hadn't seen anything like that until this. It was 10 years later this happened. It was the same type of a thing, but it was even more so. What I want to talk about now is the setsuden. We had TEPCO — I think this is around the 14th — saying that they just didn't have enough power, so they were going to be rolling blackouts through the city of Tokyo. News was talking about this. I was worried about it. It's cold. How do you heat your home? How do you keep your refrigerator on? A lot of people were worried about this.

00:36:46 John Daub: An amazing thing happened, and this is where I'm so proud of living here in Japan. And understanding how society works. It's just an incredible thing when you think about it. The rolling blackouts — they occurred. We had a few of them in the beginning, and then they didn't really do it anymore. You don't want to know why. Because every single person in Japan started to use less electricity. TEPCO apparently was going to run a deficit — I think 30%. They couldn't get enough electricity. They were missing 30% of the electricity to provide the demand to people. So people cut down their electricity by 40%. It's amazing. Factories started to operate at night instead of during the day, because during the day people needed it for heat and stuff. So people would go to work at night and do night shifts more than they were doing day shifts, and shut down the power during the day when people needed it.

00:37:35 John Daub: So the Japanese people came together, and there's rolling blackouts, and they kind of really never happened in Tokyo. I just remember it a couple of times where we had no power for three hours or so. And then they kind of went away because TEPCO was seeing something amazing. People in Japan altered their behavior so that they didn't use much electricity. They turned the thermostats up — so if they only needed heat, if it got really, really cold, and it didn't — only heated just a little bit instead of a lot. People started to turn off their lights a lot more when they didn't need it. They started doing things that they — to conserve power. It was just so much talked about that everybody got in on it, and it followed Japan through for the next several years because they had a shortage of electricity.

00:38:21 John Daub: Where we had a cool biz movement where people wore no more neckties to work. It was kind of a welcome thing. People wore short sleeves. That summer was the hottest summer I remember. There was no air conditioning anywhere. Escalators had stopped. So I remember every station — there's no escalator. People had to walk the escalators for a while, which is fine, but it's hard for those that have accessibility problems. But they might have turned it on for some people if you had those kinds of issues. I'm not sure what they were doing, but the escalators were shut down. Power lights were — many lights were shut down just to the basic minimum, just to conserve power. It was amazing. So the rolling blackouts that they talked about never really occurred. That's something I recall from 2011, where the Japanese people just all came together to do their part to do something. We did that with a lot of things that had to do with the Great Tohoku earthquake in that day.

00:39:14 John Daub: I want to show you now. Do you have nightmares about that moment? Not anymore, but I did at the time. It was really, really — if I start to talk about the stories of the people that I met when I went to volunteer in Tohoku the months after, then I'll start welling up. And I still have trauma from that — from volunteering to go up there. And I didn't do it as much as many of my friends. I was just up there, I think maybe four or five times. I had friends that were there for months, digging people up, digging people mud out of their houses and stuff. And I'm sure they have even more traumatic stories. But I remember helping a lot of people, and they were so thankful. They had nothing to give us for it. And the stories that they exchanged with us will live with us forever.

00:40:00 John Daub: Because I remember just looking at my friends — Mike is one of them, I'm sure you guys — he's been on the show a couple of times. He was with me on one of them where the guy told me the story of his wife and kids who were no longer there, as I think we moved the refrigerator back into his house. And he had taken all the flooring out to dig the mud out, and he had been a couple of months now. He's doing it mostly by himself, I think. And he — after we moved the refrigerator, and I remember he told us — we sat down and he told us his story. I guess he hadn't told anybody before. And yeah, I won't share that to you right now, but it's just a tough one.

00:40:33 John Daub: So this is the experience of the 3/11 earthquake. Wow. In Tohoku. Okay, so I'm going to turn down the sound and you can just see the images here. This is — I'll put a link in the description so you can go and take a look at this. I highly recommend you watch this because it's all about earthquake safety. This is the Bosei Center in Joganji near the SkyTree. Maybe it's about a 10-minute walk here. But you can feel it — what it was like that day. But from the seismic activity, the data, they put it in and they do it. And for me — I'm — this is not just feeling the earthquake. It's like I remember every single shake. It's etched into my core on how it moved. It was a long one, so you could see it's still going. It seemed to last for like three minutes.

00:41:19 John Daub: I don't know what to do at this point. It's still going. I don't know what to do. I just kind of get under the table. Yeah, I know my legs are sticking out. It's not perfect because I know I'm in a safe space to feel this, but look — you just can't stand up. You can't do anything in this kind of a situation. And the aftershock felt just as scary as this. I also show you the Kobe earthquake and how that was different. That was even more violent in many respects, because that was more of an up-and-down type of an earthquake. This one was like a ride. It's still going. And it was still going on — the earthquake. Yeah. So if you want, you can take a look at this. I go through like the worst-case scenario with typhoons, and I talked to them about earthquake safety and recap what I felt that day. So I think it's a pretty good episode. It's called "How Japan's Largest Earthquakes Really Felt." You might want to check that out. And at the end of it, I talk about my experience, which is pretty much similar to what this is, but this is certainly in a lot more detail.

00:42:19 John Daub: So the months after — the weeks and months after the Great Tohoku earthquake, that's what I call it, the Great East Japan Earthquake. There's a lot of ways that we talk about it these days. I don't know — it's just — for us, this day is one where we kind of reflect on those that we lost, what had happened. The hardships of the weeks and months after — that whole year seemed to be just completely ruined by this. And people's lives, livelihoods — even in Fukushima, I had friends that owned businesses in Iwaki, where I used to live in 2000, you know, 26 years ago — their businesses never really came back after this. They're still kind of — you know, they had to sell or just give it up. One of them had a hotel business, and you just couldn't keep it going. It's tough. It's a tough one.

00:43:09 John Daub: Yeah. Any questions? I'll take a look at it. The weather that day was a high of 14 degrees Celsius. And at night it went down to about — I don't know — 4 degrees Celsius. So zero is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way. So it's quite a big difference in the temperature. Yeah. Major aftershock happened at 3:15 PM. I wrote this down here. And by late afternoon, people were — sunset was 5:45 PM, and that's when people started to walk home, because there's not much you could do here. Yeah. Everyone was in the streets and had that long walk home. There's one note here. The sound when an earthquake happens — you hear everything creaking. You have the telephone lines going above you. But I talked to friends in the years afterwards, and one thing that they remembered was the vending machines rattled in a way that they hadn't heard since.

00:43:56 John Daub: Every single can was rattling inside those vending machines, making an extraordinary racket. I don't think any vending machine toppled over. I'm not sure. But every can, every bottle inside there was rattling inside of the vending machines. And it echoed through a lot of the alleys. And people that lived around vending machines — that's one of the things that they remembered. When that massive earthquake happened, I was inside my house, so I didn't hear that. But I remember friends telling me about the vending machines in Tokyo and the sounds that were coming. It's just a rumbling sound. Everything is swaying, creaking. There are cracks in my building as a result of it — that's made out of cement, a good deal of it. There are cracks in it from 2011 that day. And it took them years before they repaired all of it.

00:44:37 John Daub: And that's one of the reasons why Tokyo has had a lot of reconstruction — buildings coming down where they could. They're redoing the city in preparation of what could be the big one that's even bigger underneath Tokyo Bay. Tokyo, every single day is a lot safer as a result of the construction and the tearing down of old buildings. As much as I hate it, more prepared to minimize loss of life as a result of it, Japan is very well stocked by — one of the other things I really recall from that day are the endless alerts on my iPhone 4 or 5. I can't remember if it was a 4 or 5. You just kept getting — and everybody's phone was going off. And that's the one thing a lot of people recall from that in Tokyo. Just all your neighbors, everybody experiencing these Japan Meteorological Agency emergency thing breakthroughs from the carrier. It's — you had to turn them off. It's like, "Okay, there's an aftershock. What do you do?" Because there's an aftershock two minutes later. The sheer number of aftershocks — I think they're like 1,500 in a very short amount of time.

00:45:36 John Daub: It was extraordinary. And again, I ended up going to — I evacuated to — this was about 10 days later. I found a place to stay in Osaka at a capsule hotel for three days. And the reason I went was I was getting seasick. I was getting really, really sick of the swaying. And I ended up staying in this capsule hotel for a few days and then with a friend for a few days. And I came back. I think I take a Seishun Juichigo Kippu, which is a local train ticket. Took me maybe 10 hours to get to Osaka, something like that on the local train. And yeah, I was a lot younger then too. That's how that — you know. I evacuated too for a little bit just because the aftershocks are rough. I came back and I felt a lot more balanced because Kansai wasn't getting those aftershocks. But Tokyo — every — it felt every five minutes there's like a magnitude 4 or 5 earthquake.

00:46:28 John Daub: Your house is swaying every five minutes for months. All right, so it wasn't a wonderful few months. It was even worse for those that were up in — yeah, it just — you couldn't avoid it. Any questions here? The legacy of this is something that we learned about. We keep learning about the people. A lot of people have not recovered from it because the Olympics happened and so many things happened. A lot of the construction, I feel, was not completed or has been delayed. And I think a lot has been done, but a lot is still yet to be done. And Japan — Japanese seem to live with a lot of pain. They're very good at living with a lot of pain in their lives and not complaining about it. And maybe they should complain about it a little more, I don't know. But people in Tohoku — they're grateful for what they have. They're grateful that they're alive. They miss their family and loved ones.

00:47:13 John Daub: We hear messages — the one man who goes scuba diving looking for his wife every year. Every time he goes — people who haven't given up looking for their loved ones. We hear these stories, but people seem to live with a lot of pain here, more so than in other countries. And I don't think reconstruction is complete enough where I'm satisfied because the people I talk to there seem to be okay with what they have. It's — I don't know. That would never be the case if they lived in Tokyo, though, because they're so far away. I don't know. People just seem to help out people. I was in volunteered with — I think it was called Foreign Volunteers Japan. FVJ, I don't remember. We had trucks — we ran food up from with the food banks. The food banks couldn't cover the trucks. I remember my friend Mike uses — on money rented trucks. I raised money through Yakiniku Club that I had. I worked with Ozzy Beef — shout out to the Australian beef — who gave me a lot of beef, and we were able to get that into a truck, and we went up to Tohoku and we did some barbecues, which for the people — it lifted their spirits, made it kind of like a festival.

00:48:18 John Daub: But it wasn't until like June and July because you just could not get through. The military could — they're the ones who cleared the roads, but we couldn't get through. Food trucks couldn't get through for a long time. One of the things that make me so proud of being American is that Operation Tomodachi, which doesn't get a lot of coverage. I remember the days after that, even in the Japanese news, I don't think it was covered enough. But the USS Ronald Reagan was off the coast of Fukushima offering a lot of help to the Japanese. 24,000 American servicemen were mobilized to help with that. There were an endless amount of helicopters coming from the USS Ronald Reagan and other ships, bringing in ready-to-eat rations. MREs, was it MREs or something ready to eat rations being helicoptered in. A lot of people were isolated on that day, and it was American helicopters that went in there.

00:49:05 John Daub: People that told me when I was up in Tohoku, they were really grateful for that. When they heard the rotors of the helicopter approaching, they felt like they weren't isolated. That's a big deal when you're isolated. So the — I don't know if a lot of Japanese remember it so much, but the people up in Tohoku really remember the US military and the helicopters coming in bringing in supplies — baby milk, formula, food, water, just things that they needed to get through. Warmth, jackets, blankets, things like this. Operation Tomodachi was a huge, huge thing. And I know that there was — they were really close to Fukushima, and I don't know if they were exposed to the radiation, highly likely from what they were doing with those missions. But it was — I don't think we should forget what they did that day. I think it was really great.

00:49:52 John Daub: And you know that that's one of the advantages to having the US military in Yokosuka and all — you know, Iwakuni — we have up in the Air Force base up in Camp Zama, we have a lot of really great American servicemen and women here. They often get — you know, when something bad happens, every — the news will focus on it, but when something good happens, it sometimes gets lost or they don't take the credit for it. So I think they deserve a lot of credit for what happened in the aftermath and just helping people. Because the only way you could get in to those communities was by helicopter. You just couldn't get in by car. Tank — all they had were helicopters, and there's just not enough of them. And they did a really great job of getting into those communities and figuring out how to get the supplies to people right away.

00:50:36 John Daub: As I said, it was freezing cold up there. Snow. Those weeks after were really rough. And you're living in a disaster zone. The waters receded. Nothing was there. You don't have a house anymore. You're living in a school. And you had to dig out the school in order to get a place to sleep. There's chemical spillage all over the place. Smelled — it was really a bad situation. So when those helicopters came in those weeks after, it was a big deal, really was. That should not be forgotten. Any other questions here? I'm trying to look at the chat and find it out. Don't Call Me Anthony. I happen to be one of the fly gaijin. After the disaster, I didn't come back until 2014. But you came back. You came back. This channel — my main channel — was started as a reaction to what happened that day.

00:51:20 John Daub: After I'd finished volunteering in 2012, I started saying like, "I'm working for NHK. But the programming just — it stinks. It's a lot better now. It just stinks. I can't — nobody really trusted NHK at the time." And there are reasons for it. Information was not clear for a long time. You're getting more stuff from the international media than you were getting from Japanese media. So people weren't coming to Japan, right, Anthony? Right. People just weren't coming here. Fukushima was a bad word, people. And even to this day, I'm deeply, deeply upset with how people said "Fukushima." It was just one part of it. Fukushima is a very large prefecture. Ibaraki is right next to it. That's actually a lot closer to what happened. Instead of the majority of Fukushima, Fukushima goes out to the mountains — to Aizu, Wakamatsu — and an area that, you know, I guess if you looked on the map, it's just almost as far as Tokyo in a way.

00:52:07 John Daub: But Fukushima — the prefecture — suffered greatly because of the media just saying "Fukushima, Fukushima." It was — you know, they should have just said Daiichi or Daini — the plant's name — or just the local region. But they — they branded the whole prefecture. It's like saying "Texas, Texas" for something that happened in Galveston or a city on the coast or something. But they said the whole state. So when the media said "Fukushima, Fukushima," as someone who lived in Fukushima, I said, "Oh my gosh." For years, nobody would eat the peaches of Fukushima. And the peaches are fine. They're quite far away — you know, the inland areas. That's like 100 kilometers — that's like a two-hour drive away from the coast. I believe to get the Aizu Wakamatsu is like three-hour drive from the coast. So they didn't have any kinds of issues with the food over there. But you just didn't know — anything with Fukushima was branded as being toxic. And that hurt so much because this place is the breadbasket of Tokyo. This is where you get a lot of the good stuff.

00:53:01 John Daub: So for years after, and even to this day, I'm very upset about that. And there's not a lot that you can go — you could do about it. But it's also a reason to visit the amazing place of Fukushima and go and see the onsen there. Stay there. It's an amazing place. And the peaches are some of the best in the world. I think Fukushima peaches are world-renowned, at least they should be. I'm somewhat biased though. As somebody who lived in Fukushima, I lost trust in the media during this period. Absolutely. You didn't know what to do. So I started Only in Japan as a way to get tourists to come back here. Actually, that's what it was to do — in a fun way — because NHK wasn't fun anymore. I don't do much with NHK right now. It's just — I don't know why. I guess a lot of the directors that I used to work with in the past, they probably think I've reached a level of success where I can't work with them. That's not really the case. That's not really true. I would — I didn't do NHK for the money.

00:53:55 John Daub: I think they think they have to pay me more or something, which is certainly not the case because they didn't pay me a lot then either. You get about like 40 to 50,000 yen for a four-day shoot. And that's like $300 for four days, you know — I would get for reporting for NHK. That wasn't the reason why I did it. I did it because I loved working with the team, and I love to bring a passion of Japan to the rest of the world. But they weren't doing a good job of it. Tourists weren't coming. So in 2012, 2013, I started Only in Japan, unfortunately with the help of another company, because I couldn't pay for it, because I had — I was in debt from iTunes, which was highly successful, but not from my pocketbook. And yeah, those contracts I signed were a big mistake. Nevertheless, it was a — the episodes were good, it did the purpose right.

00:54:41 John Daub: Despite the fact that I ended up losing my channel — if it was ever my channel — the misunderstanding of the contracts I signed, for sure. The content that I made was really good and had a massive impact, I think, not just on me, but what we did in 2013. Those that are watching the channel — and a lot of you have been there since this beginning — many of you come to Japan because you've seen this series or this show or something that I made, or the influence that the stuff that I made back then had on other YouTubers today. And I think that, you know, I don't know how much it impacted other YouTubers, but back then there were a lot of vlogs and not a lot of documentary-type stories. And I think, you know, maybe what I was doing inspired a lot of other creators to make stories — to make things that people remember, to up their game of creating content.

00:55:27 John Daub: And between 2012 and 2014, tourism started to grow. And I think a lot of it had to do — not from NHK, but from the effort that a lot of other YouTubers were doing at the time, of showing you how amazing this place is. And from 2014 to 2020 — 2019 — we all know the story. We started to have over-tourism problems. Probably I contributed to a part of that. But when you — when you have nothing, like no tourism was coming in in 2011 or 2012, really, because of all the bad news and how dangerous Japan was — it was a big turnaround, and I'm proud that we were able to round that corner and get people to love Japan again, or to love Japan for the first time, or to understand what was so great with Japan — all the attractions that you'd never heard about. Social media made that come to the forefront. And that all for me started as a reaction to the devastation that happened on this day and seeing people lose everything, their livelihoods, not be able to rebound from that.

00:56:20 John Daub: And to have tourists come back was a sign of hope for Japanese. When you saw tourists or internationals coming to a small town in Tohoku, that gave so much energy to the local people, saying, "Okay, we're back. People are coming to visit again. People are coming. This is great." Now maybe too many people came, and we're in a different situation today. But then it was huge. It was so huge. I was on the front page in 2014. I'm not going to be able to pull this up in time. In 2014, I was on the front page of one of the biggest newspapers in Japan. And we — and back then, circulations were really, really big. Okay, I'm gonna see if I can find this in time. The — okay, I think if I put Shimbun, it should come up. Oh, here it is. Is that it? No, that's not it. Because I was featured on the front page — I started doing more Japanese TV shows. Where is it? Sankei — oh, it's called — it was Sankei Shimbun. I was on the front page of the Sankei Shimbun. The Osaka one was even bigger.

00:57:14 John Daub: Hold a second. I can't show you that. They had a picture of me on the front page in Osaka, and it got picked up by TV, and I started to do a lot. Oh, here — here it is. I could show you that one. Can I download this one? Yeah. Oh, this is crazy. All right, check it out. This is — this is in the front page of the Japanese newspaper. I got to pull back to get that in focus. It's me and my friend Joseph. He also just ran the Tokyo Marathon. I can't get it — one is — zoom here. So from this, tourism started to — I can't get it — tourism started to really, really explode here in Japan. Prime Minister Abe said, "We want 10 million tourists." Now I got 42. All right. But back then, the media knew that YouTube was one of these things that was fueling tourism. And it's fascinating to see from that day to today how much Japan has changed, how much I have changed.

00:58:02 John Daub: And this has been my experience. If you have a question and you want to leave it in the comments below, I'm happy to try to answer it for the first couple of days. I look a lot at it. But I think if you're coming to Japan now, you should be ready for an earthquake. You should have an idea about it, and it makes a lot of sense to watch that video I produced, which gives you a good introduction to how to react in an earthquake. You're not going to know unless you actually are in an earthquake. But at this time, it's something we kind of look back on and reflect on how to prepare for an earthquake. And that's something that we all can do. The best way to prepare is to watch that episode so then you know what it feels like and what you should do in that kind of a situation.

00:58:40 John Daub: Thanks, guys, for watching for an hour. This is a really tough day for a lot of people that are living here in Japan. We kind of remember it 15 years. Things seem to go get — memories seem to fade a little bit. But for me, I don't think it's something that will ever leave me because I was here when it happened. I was here for the weeks and months after, which was even harder. And I'm glad that Japan has recovered to a point now where we can forget it. But at this cherry blossom season, you can believe one of the reasons why I show you the cherry blossom so much is because of all the hope that I get. And I think back at all the festivals that were canceled that day, and how we're having fun now, and how things have changed as a result of time. And yeah, it's — it's part of the reality of living here in Japan. You're always going to be in an earthquake. If you live here long enough, it's going to be a big one, and you just hope that you can manage to get through that okay.

00:59:29 John Daub: But it's not the earthquake, but it's the moments after the earthquake. You know, getting food, water, toilets — is the water still working? Is the heat on? You don't think about these things until they occur. And it can be a really tough, tough situation. But looking at the history of it — really fascinating. Do I want to switch to — wish Leo happy birthday, Catherine? You know, this is his birthday month. All of you know, because you were — many of you here were born on the — when he was born on this channel, you saw him. Yeah, he's going to be five. It's crazy. He's gonna be five. I might have gotten him a couple of presents. He wanted a new bicycle. He's not ready for it. He could do a pedal bicycle. He's not ready for it. Not here in Tokyo anyways. It's too dangerous. But anyways, I hope you learned something from this. I think it's a good opportunity to share information and to learn from it.

01:00:18 John Daub: I haven't been doing a livestream recently, but I just finished editing two videos that are being reviewed. So get ready for a massive amount of drops of videos now that the Tokyo Marathon is done. My goodness. And yeah, it should be a very, very interesting month of March. One last note. We just had this — yesterday was a rainy day. I wanted to go and make a livestream at the memorial. This is — yesterday was the day of the memorial for the Tokyo firebombing, where about 100,000 people in Tokyo perished in the war, which is just a tough, tough thing. And you know, in Tokyo, it's good to remember because that was a day that changed the trajectory of the city of Tokyo. And the leaders — the person to blame are the leaders of Japan who did not — after — in hindsight, when you look at the history of World War II, as soon as the US got control of Guam and Saipan, it was over. They could effectively do bombing runs from really close and nail Japan. The war was over. The leaders should have given up, but pride kept them going, and so many lives were lost as a result of that.

01:01:21 John Daub: And I hope that we can find ways to avoid all wars because this is — you look back on what happened inside of Japan, as someone who lives here, it's just some tough, tough stuff. I interviewed two people that were in their 90s, and this is going to be a big episode. And this is going to come — I've been making it for a few years. It's going to come out this year probably in June or July, before the memorial of Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Because this is the time where people start to really think about this kind of stuff, because these voices are voices that we're going to be losing if we don't talk to them now — the great generation. So look for some great content for Only in Japan. Thanks, guys, for the support. Postcard coming out real soon for March, and take care. I'll see you in another time.

01:02:00 John Daub: We will have a moment at — yeah, 2:46, right now it would be — I guess we can keep it for two more minutes. For one more minute, we'll have a moment in 30 seconds or so. It's now 2:45 PM, and will be exactly 15 years since we heard the — those sounds at 2:46 — the rumblings. I can stay with you guys for another minute. But yeah, it's a tough one. You know, hearing the stories. I talk with Mike, my friend Mike every now and then. He's now a new father. Congratulations to him, Catherine. Thank you. Happy birthday to Leo. Oh, that's nice of you. We're gonna — I'm gonna put that towards a cake. He wants a coconut cake, so I have to make it. I have to make a coconut cake. That's what he wants. What kind of cake do you want? Coconut. Really? I wish I was in Guam. All right. 2:46 — 15 years ago today. I know where I was at. And it was one of those days where you're marked in time in stone. Where were you when 9/11 happened? I was in Kenya. I just came down from climbing Kilimanjaro. I was in Nairobi. I was going to a supermarket in Nairobi. And I remember hearing the radio in Swahili — "This, this, this — White House — this, this, this — New York." And I ran back to the hotel that I was staying at in Nairobi. We turned on the TV — CNN — and I remember exactly that day like it was yesterday.

01:03:22 John Daub: Same thing with the Great East Japan Earthquake. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember exactly what I was doing, where I was. It's crazy — crazy how fast 15 years go. But everything I've done — not everything, but a great deal of what you see here on Only in Japan — well, the whole channel was born as a result of people not coming here. Now I got too many people coming here, so to speak. I don't think — I think that's the case, but we have a lot of people coming to Japan. But in 2012, and the minute is up — we would still be going on. We would right now still be in the earthquake. Fifteen years ago at this time, nobody — very few people were coming to Japan. Everyone was leaving. And I remember it like it was yesterday. And I'm so grateful that people see Japan as a destination to come and visit, because I remember where we came from and where we are now. And Japanese are grateful too. So don't take the headlines and what you see on the media so much. People are very grateful that tourists come, because on days like this, remember — nobody was coming here. Tourism wasn't an industry, really. Now it is. People make a livelihood off of it.

01:04:24 John Daub: And I'm grateful for all of you for watching me — for many of you, for all these years. Another earthquake could probably be over by now. Oh, man. Take care, guys. Just remember, go watch that video if you haven't already on what Japan's largest earthquake felt like. And I'll see you in another episode tomorrow as I probably take you around a walk outside — and a little bit more positive vibes with the cherry blossoms just less than a week away, and Leo's birthday less than two days away. All right, guys. Matane. Thanks, Catherine. Thanks, guys.