20 Years in Japan | Anniversary Day Q&A

hey everybody so it's John here and I decided the time that I've been here in Japan believe it or not I yesterday was July 11th and that was the 20th anniversary that was the day that I arrived here in Japan it seems like yesterday and over those 20 years there's so many things that I've learned so many things that have changed my life either for the better or for the worst it's really hard to know how my life has changed being an expat but I yeah I never really saw myself as an expat Aloha hey everybody how you doing I see some of the comments not popping up I appreciate everybody tuning in to watch this but just to go back over the last 20 years so many things have happened in my life and it's it's almost been half of my life believe it or not that I've been living here in Japan believe it or not I don't believe it but it's true and how has Japan changed me and I do a question and answer on patreon which is a site where people can support the this series twice a month I do a question and answer live with with people who support me there and one of the questions is you is how has Japan changed me or what are some of the things about Japan that has really impacted me or what's different between Japan and another country and what makes Japan special why do you like Japan so much why do you stay in Japan what brought you to Japan Japan Japan Japan and in this livestream I thought I would take some time and not just show you some pictures I have a photo album here that yeah you know I came here before the the era of the Internet okay we still took pictures well I wouldn't say well before the internet I would say this is I came here before oh geez before the digital cameras became big before we had YouTube before we had were you know you could download stuff but it took forever I used to connect with the Internet I would go to payphones and it would bite well I'll tell you all about this in this live stream so for the next 20 minutes or so we're gonna go down memory lane talk about what Japan used to be what Japan is today how Japan has changed me etc etc I don't even know where to start but maybe the best place to start is at the beginning oh so the reason why this livestream started late was because the the post cards for the patreon post card clubs are here these are the square watermelons I went to the farm a couple of years ago and these are the post card for this month's patreon supporter so thank you for that all right now we're gonna take a look at some of the photos the thumbnail is a photo of the first or second week that I came to Japan and I started in Japan my job was as an English teacher and it wasn't an English teacher to adults like a lot of people who come to Japan it was one for children and the weird thing about that is that they had classes well it was a it's a private school it's called Amity which is a division of Eon which is a very big English chain here in Japan and some of the students that I taught were under the age of three some of them were one I had one student it was six months and several students that were not even born yet they called them prenatal stimulation classes and it was essentially just a place for parents to get together and talk amongst themselves but also practice and learn English with which they could use to teach there are kids I'm gonna go down on the floor because when you look at photo albums when you look at photos hey Lois thank you I don't know you know I don't know if you can see congratulations but I could say it's been quite a ride alright so I can't I can't show you all of the photos but what I can't not Aeon mall is John Smith it's a different slightly different company but I can't show you I can't show you all of the photos but I can show you some of them now like I was saying we didn't really have the internet and if I wanted to call the United States I used to have to use one of these telephone cards there's kinkakuji here's Sapporo Tower and you can see here telephone card it says right here you see how when you when you use the telephone card each time it would punch a hole so you would know how much money is left and there's 105 units if you buy one for a thousand yen and so you get five extra units units this is one of an airport which which Airport is that oh that's a Kansai Airport let me see here move this up a little bit yeah there's Osaka Castle I don't know who that lady is oh wow and there's Aeon that's my business card I'm the first one oh wow this is really really old this is my friend Gavin and that's Nagoya boy do I look different I look different a lot more hair than I am so this is Nagoya castle and it looks like almost Tokyo Tower there's there's the Nagoya took TV tower and 180 meters high so my friend Gavin he doesn't look like this anymore but he's the reason why I originally came to Japan he came as a jet a je T which is a program where people can come from other countries and work in Japanese schools as a teacher either as an assistant or I guess to teach English directly to the kids and he was a jet and he was here for a little bit over two years I believe he studied Japanese at college with me and I didn't study Japanese but he did he was very much in love with Japan and he left after 2 3 years I'm still here after 20 so it's it's pretty funny he knew Japanese he studied it in college I didn't know a word of it now I think I could speak better Japanese in him and it's good it's really funny but he's a good friend of mine and now I believe he's in Michigan but this was the first city that I lived in was in Nagoya and this is before you could see Nagoya has two big towers they didn't even have that back then they had these guys these silly dancers that look like Elvis and for me Nagoya was like an amazingly unique city because because you know down here guys all right yeah because you know Nagoya is not Tokyo Nagoya is not Osaka it's not it doesn't have everything that those cities have like for example Starbucks was only in Tokyo 20 years ago and I you know there's so many times where I kind of missed home because it was my first time living abroad I would take the train the local train down to Osaka or to Tokyo which took about 7 to 8 hours and I would have a cup of coffee at Starbucks and the only reason was just so I could feel a little bit like I was back home because it's it can be overwhelming to live in a foreign country even in Japan now I'm quite used to it but back then nagoya didn't have much foreign influence at all I mean there was a McDonald's there's McDonald's is everywhere there used to be a Wendy's but that went out of business Cinnabon came as a test shop and that went out of business and Taco Bell was there in 1998 I believe and that went out of business too because people didn't know what Taco Bell was they thought you know taco means octopus takoyaki so when they saw Taco Bell they thought it was like a takoyaki fast food shop so they go and they're looking for takoyaki and they got tacos which is the Japanese for tacos taco so it was very confusing so Taco Bell went out of business initially so the only thing I had was Hard Rock Cafe which had really good nachos and cheeseburgers and then McDonald's and that was it and that wasn't enough so I would make the trip to Osaka or to Tokyo on the weekends just so I could get a little bit more to feel like I was an American again because you know GUI you don't have it's it's one of the most Japanese cities if there's this it's not famous for anything except for maybe Toyota is nearby it's a famous as the birthplace of pachinko it's got a TV tower just like all the other places it's got such high which is an entertainment district but it's not really famous for anything else fireworks does famous there sculpt craft wood stone crafting is very famous in that area the Miko our region but it's a great place to live cuz it's so Japanese you know alright so then I want to show you a little bit more here wow this is crazy I have to make sure that the photos are yeah alright check it out so these are what some of the students these are the parents of the students oh I missed that necktie ah I lost it like these take these three kids I forget their names they were so small and they're so young and I was teaching them English and where was this isn't Fuji Galka actually this is I think about 2003 four or five years after no mm no no year 2000 two years after I'd been in Japan and mmm the students that I taught were were but they could hardly speak Japanese and here they are learning English and I really respected that that the parents would bring their kids in and to learn English there's some more down here we had a lot of fun in the classes it was more than just learning the alphabet but some of the some of the stuff that we learned and you know what twins 20 years ago these kids are like 30 years old now 2530 years old now that's crazy isn't it oh man that's so crazy here's here's some of the teaching staff from where's uh custody this is where each Ito the baseball player lived and this is the teaching staff that I work with and this is the new teacher Nick and we went drinking on his first day and and I was working for the head office of the English school and I trained him to be the best teacher he could be he was an awesome teacher and this does cost agai station right there Nick like Charlie's Angels I don't know why so we did a little Charlie's Angel pose and that's the kind of stuff that that's the kind of stuff that we did back then but my first experience in the Japan 1998 let me go back now and now I do kind of an idea what I was doing teaching kids the schedule was pretty rigorous I think I usually had about thirty teaching hours which is a lot it's a lot of planning a lot of actual teaching in the classroom but after you get used to it it becomes pretty easy now let me take you all the way back to the first time I came to Japan for talk about it I saw it so he just gave me a super check for tacos all right I arrived in July 11th 1998 at Kansai Airport and I was greeted by the the staff of Amity Aeon they'd come to pick me up very very nice they had Shinkansen tickets and took me back to Osaka I remember getting off the airplane there weren't any other foreign faces none it was the most surreal experience I had traveled a little bit I did most of my traveling between contracts well I was an English teacher but it for me it was so like bizarre everyone had Japanese faces I know this sounds really weird since everybody was Japanese I looked around everything was so clean everything was new consul airport was a pretty new airport back then and it was just overwhelming this it smell different the weather the temperature on my face felt different you coming outside the signs were different everything was so different and I don't remember everything everything from that first night remember being overwhelmed by so many different things and I arrived into Okayama which is where the headquarters for Yanis the English school chained to the training center back then it was a very simple training center because the company was a lot smaller then and I looked outside of the Train the window from where I was staying and I could see the front of the station or the back of the station and I just saw back then and we call them iki my it just had so many neon lights I've never seen like Times Square I've seen that in New York but to be sitting here looking out the window on the day that I arrived in Japan gone wow this place is awesome like look at this this is so many colors so much so very Wow and this was also the day of the World Cup finals between France and Brazil so while I was overwhelmed I also had massive jet lag I mean anyone who's coming from North America Japan realizes and they know that you're going to it's it's 13 hours difference from New York so you're gonna be up in the middle of the night and you're gonna be sleepy in the middle of the day it sort of works out like that for the first for the first week or so and I couldn't sleep so the World Cup final I believe started like 4:00 a.m. and I was watching France and Brazil on the first night I believe and France really kicked kicked Brazil's butt that day I think Zidane had two goals before the first half I remember it because I was so wide awake and everybody around everyone in in the in Okayama was asleep probably except for me watching this World Cup final so it's very ironic that 20 years later by the way that France is gonna be in the final again and it seems like we've come complete full circle and to see that you know there they are again France is in the finals and I it looks good for France because they really whooped Brazil in 1998 and Croatia is gonna have a pretty good match I think in the World Cup that's gonna be in a couple of days but that first week that first month in Japan for those of you who are thinking of coming here and living here it's pretty cool but back then in 1998 there weren't you know I don't know you know Japan was not really tourist destination was it did I you know 1998 everyone in the United States wanted to go to the Caribbean they wanted to go to Europe I'm talking about most from people in the east east coast of the United States they wanted to go to Europe they wanted to go to the United to the Caribbean they wanted to go down to Mexico to Cancun they didn't really look most people didn't want to go to Asia and didn't want to go to Japan at all and in fact Japan was was just this place that was they made cars and TVs and they were really expensive I was really expensive and it was really just so far and so weird that many people many Americans didn't want to make that trip as tourists and now everybody it seems a lot of the world sees Japan as the go-to destination right now so it's amazing how 20 years the perception of Japan has completely changed and I could see this over the course of those two decades just a progression of how Japan was was then and how Japan is now it's such a huge you know it is really different in so many ways and yet it's really the same and and over the next ten minutes hopefully I can show you some of these pictures and and also also show you how Japan has changed a little bit oh man look at this this is crazy so in the English school these are two high school students they're probably married with kids now they were 14 back then and this is the year 2000 this is a Waukee city in Fukushima so they were 14 and this was the year 2000 so 18 now so that I mean they're like 30 30 30 to 34 years old that's crazy but they were they really loved English and that was that was pretty cool this this was cuicci I think his name was and his mom was very very what really wanted him to learn English and was very active at home teaching him and I thought that was really good these are the alphabets that I made and I would jump up and down going ABC we were always always very active that's Halloween I was a really bad pirate and these are the some of the activities that you do in English school oh sorry and there you go there's a classroom full of students I used these volute these balls to throw around the class to get people to think and stay active yeah it was it was just a really good experience learning about the culture there's one of the new teachers from a Waukee having yaki hoodie wow that was this is like eighteen years ago when I lived in Fukushima yeah so how is how is Japan changed I see Jim is in the house I'm sure Jim has some questions what was the craziest thing you did as an English teacher in Japan um I didn't really do anything that crazy because I was so exhausted by the time oh gosh if I go back and I think about it I think it was all of the traveling that I did by local train I know it's not a crazy thing but you make about $3,000 a month as an English teacher that's pretty good considering that the company would subsidize my living costs because I was a head office worker I got a little bit more benefits not that not that much but I had like a per diem as well as a living cost like a small expense account to do some stuff and and my rent was was pretty much paid for so that was all savings so I wanted to save the money because every time the year contract ended I would take the bonus money and all of the savings and I would travel and I would travel and travel and travel around the world around Asia to see as much as I possibly could and then when I ran out of money or I wanted to come back to Japan usually because I met somebody and I fell in love I would come back and that happened three times yeah I would be here and just do it again because I really loved the job because you know whenever you get a chance to to teach kids and you see them learn and grow even if it's for a short a period of time it's a very satisfying job although it was very stressful too because you have to work a lot preparing for the lessons and then teaching the lessons you go home exhausted I didn't you know I really never did anything crazy I remember what I do remember was there was a time where I thought maybe I didn't want to do this anymore so I'm going to try to interview for a job and these was back in 2003 so I had a connection at Deutsche Bank and I have a degree in economics so I went into to Deutsche Bank's headquarters in Tokyo and I interviewed for a job I got the interview and they asked me about about my credentials and why I wanted to work there and you could smell the snobbery walking into the office it's a beautiful office in Tokyo and I remember he's an American guy he'd gone to all the right schools and he had his suspenders and his little expensive necktie and what was he it what did he say he says lucky you don't he says he was very critical of being an English teacher I think he thought that English teachers were just partying and came here just for the fun of it and didn't do much of anything and I didn't learn anything I think that's what he thought he said I didn't go to the right schools nah I his boss is the one who gave in the interview for the Tokyo office so he said I didn't I didn't go to the right schools I and I told him look you know and I knew where the where the interview was going is to look I know what you guys are doing you do lots of stuff with areas in this read within this region lots of things to help as well as lots of things that lasted investments and I know these places I've traveled to these countries I know these people said I'd be perfect you know working here and didn't work out and to be honest really that was the best thing that happened because imagine if my if I did end up working for a big bank how would I have changed what kind of a person would I have been I wouldn't have this YouTube channel that's for sure so you know over the course of these 20 years there have been so many turns and twists that I wonder how it would have turned out if I had had gone down a different path 2003 was a big point in my life I'm looking for I'm looking for some other photos further down the line most of these come from the year 2000 and 2001 yeah yeah 2001 check it out I'm down here guys cherry blot spring cherry blossoms 2001 and I have some of these browned flowers that's how long ago this was and we taken the staff from Fuji Galka and we went to the castle and you can see there's all the cherry blossoms from 2001 they didn't change that much just my friend Yann I used to live in fujinomiya so he came to visit me in fujinomiya I lived this is a view from my this is a view from my balcony believe it or not this is a view from my balcony of Mount Fuji from fujinomiya do you believe that I would open them open up my window and I miss is my view from my window unbelievable one of the most beautiful places I ever lived fujinomiya this is you can see Mount Fuji in the background in front of the shrine I lived here in 2001 there's the staff of the school I help them rebuild this school because the last teacher did something really bad and they had to rebuild the school so I came and I was I was a turnaround manager is what they called me Wow and I lived in this tatami room I had this wonderful tatami room I loved pizza I found cherry coke in Tokyo and I brought it back for everybody they didn't like it and the day I left I was treated like a hero I got a medal the metal that had looked like in the shape of Mount Fuji and I think a lot of the students had signed it and that was a really good feeling and when I left fujinomiya we turned the school around and as you could see a lot of really happy kids again Wow oh man I'm these kids are all these kids are all like adults now it's pretty crazy to think wow I missed these kids yeah so so III lived in this Fuji and I moved 16 times well while I lived in Japan over the course of the first eight years I lived in Japan from 1998 to 2004 2005 I moved 16 times and lived in different cities and all around the country and I've really got to know about all the different regions there was the comment yesterday that said in one of the videos he's like look he says okay some expat moves to Japan and he thinks he's an expert on Japan and I I don't even know how to respond to that and you know I I'm not an expert on Japan but my here's my here's here's my credentials I've been living here for 20 years I've lived in 16 cities I've hitchhiked the country from top to bottom twice I've been every Prefecture twice I observed a lot I can speak the language conversationally I I'm married to a beautiful Japanese woman I don't know if I'm an expert I'll tell you one thing I know a lot of what's going on around me and I I know I know how things work and people can say that I'm not an expert and that's fine and I'll be the first to say I'm not an expert but all this experience has to be valuable for something and I I just I hope this is one of the reasons why I started this series - it was after the great - Hoku earthquake and it was what can I do to help Japan what is my value to where I live right now and it was using the experiences that I had living in so many different places knowing all the events and the cultures and when people in Hiroshima tell me about local spots I can say I've been there just like with somebody from from Fukushima tells me about local spots and you walkie or in Koriyama I cut I can I can relate to that or in places in Nagoya like Fuji Galka are Okazaki Toyohashi or yokai G I know all of these cities pretty well because I've lived in in these areas I've been to give foo how many times that I've been to ogaki and then from my heart my Barra all the way around to Kyoto I know all the train lines and the loops from taking the station judge you keep I don't know if I'm an expert but I know a lot of stuff so that's my response after 20 years now why did I come to Japan do that hashtag thanks for a job you know I didn't I don't know what I am I'm just I'm just an expat living in Tokyo so I got the travel bug in college and this is sort of where it all started I show you two showed you that my friend I Gavin introduced me to Japan and encouraged me to come here and I'm glad that I listened to him and I did make the trip he lived in she Tehama or taught the Yama it was on the end of Chiba and he had a car he had a house the jet program really seemed to take care of the teachers and I lived in a really small apartment in a city called Okazaki that was my first city here in Japan I lived there for 14 months it's a suburb of Nagoya and I I was whenever I came to took Tokyo I would go and I would stay in Chiba with him and it was quite amazing just to see the differences in culture from one place to the next and that's when I realized that Japan this is very important for you for everybody to realize Japan's geographically is the same size of California let's say okay you can drive across it in less than a day I mean you can go from the top of al Qaeda all the way down to Kyushu if you drive pretty fast in 24 hours I mean you can do it in a day probably less but within that within this country there's so many differences so much diversity it's the people may look the same but between Akita and Tokyo there's so much diversity that it's just so different in many ways between Tokyo and Osaka it's so different and anyways between uh you know good MA and Miyazaki it's like two people in Japan that's like different countries almost because they have regional dialects they have different foods they have sort of a different way to live as well they have different styles they have different histories and I this is something that I learned almost right away in Japan after traveling it that we look at Japan on the whole from as Outsiders but here in Japan we see every Prefecture having their own uniqueness and that's like for 47 prefectures like 47 states of Japan and I I'm always gonna be fascinated with how diverse this country is although if you look at the people they all kind of look the same but if you look at the history if you look at the areas and the geography and the foods and and the dialect it's so different too and that's just one of the uniquenesses so I'm gonna go back through my photo album a little bit here yeah I'll keep those famous for rice the first trip that I took abroad does anybody know what this is this is the gates of Buckingham Palace and it was I think 24 hours after the Princess Diana had lost her life in Paris and the whole world was was mourning and my I bought the TIC tickets to go from the United States to London so far in advance and when the day I got there the whole country was in mourning was it was pretty surreal and that these are the this is my trip in 1996 that changed changed me there's strawberry fields and Liverpool Penny Lane this is like I stayed in youth hostels that that's a guy from Norway that girl in the Middle's from Australia and I you know in the United States I didn't meet a lot of people from other places in the world mostly in American and I believe that we had everything in the United States and I was kind of right and I was kind of wrong because there's a whole world out there and I didn't really realize this until well this is in Northern Ireland I went to Dublin and then I went to Belfast and back in 1919 a eight Bell fasters says 19 this is 98 its roof flip Torah but bat back then it was like like there was really big police presence and stuff in Belfast it was kind of cool and there was Scotland and gosh I have all these stories that tell haggis eating haggis and I was there Sweden there's my friend in Sweden Uppsala we're having schnapps small and yeah there's my friend and in Munich in Oktoberfest we were there whoa this is 20 more than 20 years ago it's pretty cool there's my friend Eric he's 210 centimeters tall we met in and they're from Holland but we met and we met in the Czech Republic we're just playing these are so so fun oh there's Joe there's Berlin 20 years ago so all these all these August backpacking this Cracow 20 years ago I remember everyone was thought it was so unique because I I had dark skin so people in Poland this is in Cracow came to say hi to me and wanted to get pictures or like whoa you look so different like well I feel different - pretty cool Wow that's Budapest this is my first trip to cluj-napoca in Romania so in their rebuilding the church in cluj-napoca there's my friend Gabriela I visited her when I was in Europe a couple of years ago we both have gotten different there's Sofia in Bulgaria not many tourists in Bulgaria and then here's Istanbul so much fun and it was it was these kinds of trips that really changed me all right let me back here so just to give you an idea of this is back in 1996 1997 1998 and this set up for where I am now because after I'd seen yeah Constantinople and because after I traveled to about I don't know like 50 countries or so I said going to Japan and living there it's not really that big of a change is it it was it was a huge change and I like to go back to that first day when everyone was Japanese and there was like it's what seemed like no diversity what little I knew when I first arrived and how much more I know now some of the stereotypes of Japan that I learned are real and some are not real and some are not warranted Japanese are very shy they they lack self-confidence because they don't feel like they've studied enough or they haven't prepared enough for something I remember asking friends I said why don't you go to the United States and not take a tour but just go on you're on your own and they didn't have the confidence to speak English they said they wanted to go to the English school and feel like they were prepared before they could go to the United States and I I think that a lot of people don't live their dreams in Japan or become entrepreneurs because they don't feel like they can ever be ready and in America the way we did things was that look we're never really going to be ready so we throw ourselves into situations after a little bit of training and then learn on the job we're in Japan people don't seem to do that they just kind of try to get certifications and get as prepared as possible so that they have the confidence inside to do something and this is such these are just one of many big differences between Japan and the United States that I learned people don't get angry angry is an emotion that just turns off people here were if you get angry the United States you could probably get people to listen to you here people turn themselves off when you get angry it's like the complete opposite of the United States in so many ways and it wasn't it literally took me about four or five years before I got used to before I got used to how things worked here and still yeah u.s. is I don't know if this is full of rage there's some pretty there's some pretty common relaxed places in the United States but in Japan we have like a silent anger you never really show your emotions here and this is this is not a bad thing it's not a good thing either the biggest thing it took me thirty five minutes into this livestream to get to it but the biggest thing that I learned when I living here in Japan was to not think so much about myself this is this is sort of huge and I this isn't a Japanese thing by any means but for me how I grew was I stopped seeing myself and I started seeing the people around me more and what this we have an expression in Japanese called KY called cookie dough made a cookie yo meter you can read the air okay so you read the air and instead of looking at yourself and and if and if you're looking at yourself and how you feel and you're not really focused on the other people around you and you know when in Japan you have to watch the person when you're drinking you have to watch and see if their glass is empty so even though you're talking you're also doing something else you're watching you're the person next to you and when their glass is empty you notice it and you take care of them and you pour them another you pour them another glass of sake and this is just one example but now you start to focus on on everything around you and you become more aware of your surroundings you become more aware of how people when you're in a group you I stop thinking about my nervousness and I start thinking about looking at the faces and looking for body language that sees are they tired are they bored should I change my style should I should I speak more loudly or quietly how can I change up to two because I can notice the people around me and they're in their body languages and now twenty twenty years after living in Japan I now listen to the way people breathe I think this is something in Japan people have a communicate through breathing this is I know this sounds really weird but the way that people breathe or like there's it's it's it's hard for me to come up with it but the way people breathe and their body language or the way that they exhale or inhale tells a lot through communication of what they're thinking without having to say any words and this is something I guess it took years before first I learned to notice other people around me and notice how they were feeling and noticed their body language and then I started to notice their breathing then I started to notice other little things and that's helped me also when I go back to the United States because now I can kind of look around and notice all the other people around me and when we're always talking about me me me me me I can kind of stop and and it makes me a better listener it makes me a better person I think and in that in this kind of way Japan has made me a much better person because here you know it truly is gosh I don't know how to say this um we we all know like Japan is very team-oriented right we all know that Japan is very centered on the team yeah and in the United States we're very centered on the individual if you can see this in baseball where the power hitter and the individual stats are very impressive in the United States and in Japan players focus more on the team and winning and what can they do to help the team the same with corporations the same with companies and I didn't get this so much the first few years that I was teaching in Japan this is a huge thing that I had it took a long time for me to learn because it's just not it wasn't in my my the way I learned things to do it this way I to do things you know where you have to sacrifice for the team and you know everything was not for me to build me up for example you have to build the team up you have to make the people around you this is stuff I guess you learn as adults all right this is stuff that you probably should learn in every country as an adult but it's just come it's just much stronger here in Japan you have to make the people around you stronger better and that's good for the team and not everybody does it in Japan but the people who are leaders in Japan and they I wish there were a lot more of them they're the ones who have an ability to make the people around them better people and they sacrifice a little bit from themselves and they don't look so much for the credit but they can use use their skills to or use their ability to see everybody else and make them better at their jobs and this is one of the reasons why I think in the 1980s in the 1990s and in the 2000s Japanese companies are very very strong it's because I think companies like Toyota and Sony they had some of the smartest people from Japan coming all together into the into these big companies and they work together as a team each person making the person next to them stronger whereas in the United States we would we would work in one job for a couple of years then we would switch to another company for a higher salary and then increase our experience and then that would give the new company somebody who had a more diverse experience that's good for the United States and Japan to work with the same company and build stronger and stronger relationships with the people around you makes you get to know the team better and as a result makes the company stronger and I think in those three decades 80s 90s and the 2000s one reason that Japan had a lot of successes because the teams were stronger and they made Toyota made amazing cars they were always finding the weak points in their products and they did that always as a team because I I used to live at the sitting next to Toyota and the students that I taught were from Toyota they were Japanese Japanese who went and lived in Kentucky or lived in Tennessee at the Toyota factories and they came back to Japan and wanted to keep their English skills high but the result of me teaching them was that I got to learn a little bit of the Toyota way and that was kind of interesting to see how that whole city the city of Toyota is like it is the definition of a company town that works really well too there's no local taxes and everybody seems to really get that idea of community this is also another reason why Japan is so safe everybody my family came from America for the wedding a couple of months ago and I'm pretty sure they realize how safe it is in Japan to walk around and not have to worry in the city that someone's gonna mug you or steal from you or or you know mug you II rob you you did it you don't get that in Japan and I think it's because people feel a really strong part of a community here there are bad people in Japan has bad people everywhere but one of the reasons why you know I've never had any fear in Japan and why I could hitchhike the country was because I know that in Japan it's the community is very important this is very generalized but people people may not communicate like directly people are not as friendly as Americans and I say this in the sense like you can wait in a line and you can very quickly make friends with a stranger you can't do that in Japan it takes a long time for you to build trust but when you're a member of a community and you build trust within your community you you become such a strong and an important part of it and I felt like that in the last town that I lived in in the 16 places that I live because I made an effort to to know my neighbors and I felt like very much a part of it whereas I think a lot of foreign visitors or travelers that come here to move to Tokyo or to Japan they never really feel a part of Japan because they never really get involved with their community or at least they don't get involved enough they don't learn the language and get involved with the community if you do that it pays off so much in this sense of life satisfaction and you know that was one of the toughest things for me to understand about Japan the importance of being a part of the society to be a part of the community you don't do you don't do something you don't cross the street on a red light in your community because you don't want the people to think that you don't care about the rules and it's not something that I would do if there's a red light I might not cross it if there's somebody around because I don't want the kid to see me crossing and breaking the laws on a read like stuff little stuff like this I think about that I wouldn't think about in the United States the community is very important to me and that's something I think that that you don't get when you're younger or you don't get when you first move here to Japan how important the community is to people here too if you have any questions go ahead and ask right now because you know 20 years is a long time and and I hope I put and laws are meant to be broken laughs his rights that's true all right you know what lavish a very a very experienced guy asked me if told me about this about the rules he said before this is this is for you lavish before you break the rules learn what they are all right first learn the rules then you can break them don't try to break the rules until you've learned them because you learn you learn to read first you have to learn to respect the rules and after you've learned the respect the rules then you can break them because then you know how to break them but you can't break the rules until you've learned them so that means you got to follow them a little bit first huh and that's been a pretty actually I've sort of lived by those words at the front my friend told me learn the rules and then break but don't break the rules before you've learned them because you're probably gonna go to jail or you're gonna get in trouble I saw a lot of questions going going by I'm sorry if I missed it where's Ochopee he's over there he's chillin out by the desk other than the time with the drone and your knife have you had any experience with the police in Japan if you did how did it go well Walter asked a pretty good question I I didn't I haven't had too many problems with the police in fact it's just the opposite something funny um thanks for the super chat Thank You Florencia leave John alone don't worry about it I got pretty thick skin um all right the police in Japan they followed the law more so than any other country that I've ever been in they they know what the laws are and they do their job they're very competent I've haven't I haven't had any big problems with the police they do do they do do profiling and there were times where I got searched and I said I wonder why they're searching me but you don't get pugnacious you don't get upset you don't fight with the police just let him do their thing respect them and they go away faster I remember I used to go in and I made friends with the police in one of the cities that I lived in and I would just go in and say hi and the police took a very strong interest in my personal life and some of the questions that they asked me were very invasive I was like why is that any of your business they for example they asked me if I was married and I said no and I asked him why would you ask me that and he said because married people are less likely are more likely to be normal and he said you you're in your 30s and you're unmarried and that tells me that you're not you're different than everybody else I thought that was kind of weird that police took a very active interest in whether or not I was married or some of my background so when the police were asking me questions they were sort of like trying to wrap their heads around what kind of a person I was I guess bicycle theft is a problem in Tokyo apparently and police if you're riding around on a bicycle might stop you and ask you for your ID so they could background check and see if the bicycle is stolen foreigners seem to steal more bikes I say seem to because I don't know if it's true or not but they say foreigners seem to steal more bicycles than the Japanese so foreigners will get stopped more a bicycle stop will usually take about 60 to 90 seconds and if you just answer the questions smile and maybe make it calm I like to compliment people because then they go away faster they compliment you you look great today you know people oh thank you then they'll go away a little bit faster the police are no different and I really respect the Japanese police I think that if you are straight with them and you didn't do anything wrong you won't have any problems okay I saw just a couple of questions coming they quit boy Yuki 1030 most illegal stuff kind of stuff you've ever done in Japan and you knew was illegal at that time but didn't do an escape from it all right you think I'm gonna hear yeah you think I'm gonna tell you if I did something illegal you think I'm gonna tell you no and I haven't look I don't smoke I never smoked cigarettes I've never done drugs that I did I wanted to I had a friend who gave me a brownie once that had something in it and I I I got really hyper and then I got really sick for a day and a half I was just throwing up so I never did I never had any problems with drug and that was like 20 years ago that was yeah my friends at Holland they were drunk too because we'd gone to the Heineken brewery I can tell you about this and I they went before we got on the train at Central Station in Amsterdam one of them gave me a brownie and we were all just completely drunk from Heineken brewery because they let us drink extra cuz I was with three Dutch friends and I guess not a lot of Dutch people go to the Heineken brewery tour so we got a little bit extra beer we were really drunken they gave me a brownie and I ate it I wasn't thinking I didn't I didn't realize that you know that that had something in it I was really sick and I do remember feeling pretty pretty hyper and then I just was sick and I never I don't think you know it was a bad experience for me even though it wasn't a voluntarily spirit isn't worried but yeah I've never have any kind of a desire to ever do drugs or even smoke smoking I don't I don't mind if people smoke I guess because I'm at the age where I grew up where in the United States where like everyone seemed to be smoking back in the 1970s and 80s and same in Japan and I got here 20 years ago everyone was smoking smoking places were everywhere I'd try to avoid them but you you really can't it's it's hard even today it's hard to avoid smoking but at the you know it's changing but I never really I haven't I you know I I try to follow the rules I don't break the law like what do you ask it before a criminal doesn't admit their crime they're innocent right everyone in jail is innocent that's what I got from prison break from Michael Scofield yeah and Lincoln now JEP what do you dislike about Japanese and his culture that's a that's a fair question um what do I dislike about Japan that's actually a really fair question to ask um you know all right every single think eugene every single expat or a foreigner or american or wherever you're from everybody who comes to japan we kind of had this work called like the six-month Baloo's okay it's like this when the the newness of Japan wears off and you realize that you're just a part of society and that that like gloss of like whoa Japan kind of the the Polish goes away a little bit and it starts to get a little bit used and you realize boy things don't work the way I wish that they worked or that's when foreigners start to get upset or angry about Japan and that was no different this is in 1999 1998 and there were moments where I was really upset I said why doesn't Japan work this way why isn't Japan do it the American Way American ways bear this it worked so well in the United States like when you go into a bank and you have to wait there for an hour this is because every bank member has to do a huncle or get a sign and then you you finished now the procedures are much faster but I was so absurdly I go into an American Bank they say hi they know my name they sign it it's over I'm gone well as it takes so long why the banks closed at 3 p.m. they're only open for six hours do these people work there's so many little things that made me angry and I think that was that was the lowest point and I've gotten quite used to everybody every single foreigner who lives in Japan goes through a period where they're making that adjustment and I guess it's when you're in it when you're a caterpillar and you go into the cocoon and you break out as a butterfly I bet you the first couple moments as a butterfly kind of stink it's like I want to crawl on the ground I want to be able to eat leaves like I used to eat leaves with my million legs as a caterpillar now you just have butterfly wings I don't want these stupid things when the wind comes I'm pushed around and then the butterfly gets used to being a butterfly and can fly around just fine but I felt like that and a lot of foreigners do and they feel kind of lost between two cultures and you you can actually feel like you've lost your identity and I think it took me I'm gonna be perfectly honest with you about about eight years or ten years before I could I could say that I felt very balanced and feel very good with myself of being and very proud of Who I am being very proud that I have family in India and I'm really I'm so happy about that I'm very proud of being an American and having that part of my life and growing up there I'm very proud of the 20 years that I've spent here in Japan and getting to know the people and it's amazing culture and living here and making the show only in Japan I feel if I go back to 20 years ago and I compared to now I've never been in my life more balanced and happier than right now and I know this is a roundabout way to answer your question what do I dislike about Japan there was a time where I disliked just about everything I didn't like the women I hope my wife's gonna watch this isn't she I I thought with the first six months that I got here I had zero attraction to Japanese girls I just didn't think that they they were they were cute they're like little girls they weren't like women and I wasn't attracted at all and it took me I think about 2 or 3 years before it changed and it just just because there weren't that many foreign women around and I had to learn why you had to ask the question why why are why is it like this why do the women here dress different act different why are they different and when you start answering those questions on why you start to understand and it's after you you start to understand that you can wrap your head around it and then you have a great appreciation for it and then you see the attraction you know I could have married anybody but I didn't I married my wife because she's very very balanced person as well she's very beautiful she speaks English and Japanese she has a great appreciation for the United States she has a lot of respect for the United States and the world I met her in New York so we have a lot of stuff in common and that was really nice and you know but I don't think that I don't have that same feeling about Japan that I did at that lowest point what I have is a great appreciation because I asked the question why and I got to this stage where I asked why and I I spent time to learn the answers to the why by hitchhiking by traveling it was in 2003 and some of you might know this from the question-and-answer when I hitchhiked to Japan the first time in 2003 I was thinking about going back to the United States and not coming and not staying here in Japan I wanted to know why why I would want to stay in this country Japan why was this place special I said I didn't really get it before 2003 that's when I hitchhiked I didn't know Japanese very well I started in in Hokkaido I was so nervous oh my gosh I was so nervous I might have some pictures hold on I was so nervous and I've just I have two iPhones I can't find it I was so nervous um to do that first hitchhiking trip and after and here's the thing okay here's the thing for everybody who's feels nervous about doing something new whether it's doing a new job or making a trip for the first time Amanda who is a supporter of patreon knows this as well you could you're going to be nervous the first time you do anything but after the first person picked me up and took me on the ride and the hitchhiking trip started I'd never thought I would ever hitchhike in my life as soon as I challenged myself and I took that first step and it was okay I started to have the courage a new kind of courage and it changed my life I started to believe that I could do a lot of these things that I'd always talked about but never did I started to have confidence in myself and I started to really love this country because I got instead of complaining about the people and complaining about how things are different I started to answer the ask the question why is it different and I started to accept it and learn the good points about Japan and I no longer really had any of the frustrations with the country and things don't work perfectly in Japan but when they don't work perfectly I understand why now that's the difference and when you understand why you're not as angry or you're not angry anymore did I experience racism in Japan all the time actually I experienced racism everywhere that I've traveled I've experienced racism in every single one of the countries that I visited and it's not a big deal to me I'm not angry about it I think you know every person can have a different reaction to it most of the racism that you experience in Japan it happened it's a it's a result of just the lack of education the lack of meeting other foreign people it's the lack of knowing what it's like outside of Japan and it's the same in the United States I think people you know in 1998 when I looked statistics and I got my passport no 1996 when I first got my passport according to statistics in 1998 only 5% of the United States owned a passport 5% of the citizens of the United States owned a passport that means most people were not leaving the United States that means most people didn't really understand how the world worked outside of the United States because they hadn't visited the outside of the United States the same thing is it is true about Japan but Japanese have passports but they don't speak other languages so when they go on well not not it some people do I don't generalize too much but when you go when people in Japan go on a trip or tour they go on package tours where the guide is there to tell them what's happening so they always live inside of a bubble when they're traveling in Japan so that you know they might learn a little bit about the culture that they're in but they stay very much in a bubble that's very comfortable to them inside of the bubble that they're in is very comfortable and they want to stay inside of that when I traveled I wanted to get outside of the bubble as much as possible I wanted to be in discomfort because when you are in discomfort you learn to adjust you learn to change the way you think you learned to mmm you learn you learn you can't learn if you're comfortable so comfortable inside of this bubble and in Japan and this might be one of the things that I dislike a lot of people try to stay too much into this bubble and they don't want to leave it and become just have any discomfort and learning something completely new and it's the same but it's it's the same in a lot of other countries that the thing is some of the stuff that I don't like a budget Japan are very much similar than some of the stuff that I don't like about other places it's it's it's very much like that yeah and some of the stuff that I didn't I used to not like I appreciate more like why are they why is everything so small in Japan the portions at restaurants they're so small but I realized I really didn't didn't need all that food anyways I just thought if you received more you were getting more value but if you didn't really need to eat all that food is it really more value I and then in the end I was like you know I don't need to take more than I need and then we have this principle in Japan called multi multi nie means what a waste yeah and says if you take more than you need it is really such a waste and wasting food is wasting anything in Japan is is really looked down upon so when you go to these these all-you-can-eat places and you you see the Japanese taking a plate and they have it just enough that they need and they finish it they go back for more and then you see see me alright when I first came to Japan I would get one plate and I would make the plate into a mountain do you do this who else does this yeah you take a plate and your make it into a mountain of food all right you take more than you need because you feel like you want to get the value out of what you paid whereas in Japan people just take exactly what they need and if they need more they can go back and they realize this but they don't they do that because they don't want to waste because inside of them there they're taught the principles of multi which is don't waste anything don't take more than you need right i whatever his game here I was taking plates I would make literally I'd Mount Fuji on my plate and it was and I think about it it's still funny and you know what I gotta admit to you all I kind of still do that I don't do it my mountain isn't as high but I still make a mountain it's just yeah Laurette see you do it right so I mean we don't really need to take a mountain but we seem to want to take everything and it's sort of it's sort of the the buffet buffet test it says if you if you want to understand the principles of Japan and kind of understand the way people think try going to a buffet and not taking and taking just what you need in one plate without making a mountain that's to me it's still something that's how I knew I'm still American after 20 years I am NOT Japanese I am 100% American but I think I have a much greater appreciation of the world around me and being able to look at the United States from the outside in is huge during each presidential election I don't have all the campaign ads I don't have all of the noise I don't have cable news networks on 24 hours a day I read the headlines and I get get to see the United States from the outside in and it gives me a huge appreciation of the United States as a result and I think that that's I think that that's that's one of the most interesting things over the last 20 years is seeing the u.s. from the outside and how how different it is and hearing other people's opinions about the United States I'm always gonna argue for the United States even though I might not agree with something because here's another thing you never really when you go outside of the United States don't ever talk bad about your country this is something that I think so many Americans are bashing the United States and I understand you might not agree with the president you might not agree with the politics but you are a representative of the place that you're from I don't hear Japanese ever bashing Japan when they travel abroad I don't hear Europeans bashing their own country maybe a few people but you know when you bash your own country it looks really bad and you never talk and one of the things that I learned about in Japan is you don't really ever and something these are things like we should all know as adults never really talk bad about anybody or anything in front of people that you don't know because it makes it makes you look so bad even though that what you really feel you you want to always give a really positive opinion and and if people talk to me about the United States like what do you feel about Trump and all that stuff is that I'm gonna say positive stuff because that's part of who you are and your identity and when somebody who's not American looks at you they see you as an American and when you start bashing your own country in front of them it's like it's it's sort of a curious thing and you you have to take a step back and look at things from the way that other people will see you never talk bad about your own country that's one of the things that I learned 20 years living in Japan because I don't talk say bad things about Japan in my show in only in Japan and there's a reason for that - I might be critical a little bit but I will never trash Japan and I will never trash anybody's country I for that matter I'm not gonna speak publicly bad about stuff and I think if we watch TV and we watch the news in the world that we live in people like to listen to other people that they agree with and it feels good it's like living inside of that bubble that I was telling you about you have to get outside of that bubble and become comfortable and that's when you start to learn and over the last twenty years I've seen the United States change as much and this is you know what this is the most interesting thing of them all I've seen so much change here in Japan being an outsider and not being Japanese but I've seen even more change in the United States being away from it I've seen the United States changed from from from here to there over the last 20 years and that's been pretty incredible - it's that the political side of things when I left the United States politics was sort of a big deal now it's what everybody talks about so much I'd rather talk about food I'd rather talk about you know something that I saw on TV or something something else the baseball game or something like that I never I never realized how important that this is to be quote-unquote informed and yet people were a lot more happier twenty years ago as a result of not talking about politics but but you know in Japan politics is not such an important part of people's lives not like in the United States I don't want to talk about politics but it's just an interesting change that I saw over the last twenty years between the United States then and now and Japan then and now when you don't live when you're outside of the bubble you see it differently never trash America just avoid talking politics exactly I'm reading some of the comments here but okay here's one from a J blog very similar but you have dating circles speed dates which eating in Japan is very interesting so before I got married I don't wanna talk too much about this because I married as I said the first couple of years I wasn't really attracted to Japanese women at all okay I didn't understand them and now I understand them better I probably will never fully understand them just like guys will never fully understand any women because we could we but dating in Japan has always been something that's very strange there's just two ways to approach this and I'm gonna be perfectly honest and this is based on my experience in Japan people people uh Japan is a very traditional and very conservative country in many ways and there's a lot more people that are not promiscuous and fool around and then there are people who do all right with that I want to establish that very much so on the flip side there's there's a lot of people that that that when they're young and they know that they're young they take advantage of being young and they make mistakes on purpose because they're young and the excuse is it's okay because I'm young and I've had so many people say that about stupid things that they've done because they're young and so when you're dating they might date foreigners or expats or people that are different because they're curious and it's something they can do when they're young but are they but I've had so many friends Western friends they fall in love with this beautiful woman and a beautiful woman from Japan probably out of their league all right I'm being dead serious this girl could be a model absolutely gorgeous and the dude from the United States not that good okay and then when you see them holding hands it's like what an odd couple all right but she's just curious and the dude falls in love with her he / he professes his love or he so it becomes very possessive in the American Way of it and then she breaks his heart and then he gets so distraught goes back to United States a destroyed man I had so many friends how'd this happen in fact the the the guy who trained me the first week he was dating he was so proud of this beautiful girlfriend that he would show me pictures of her one month later she broke up with him just out of the blue like like she had no emotional attachment to him at all it was just over and he was destroyed and he went back to the United States and it never came back to Japan again that's just one of many horror stories so Japanese I can't say so much about the guys but the women especially people that are younger they don't have much emotional connection and they just want to try out stuff while they're young and then when they get older they become very serious it's like almost like this like a switch went off and they're like okay now I got to be serious I'm gonna get married have kids there is a friend of mine who was very promiscuous Japanese lady she was dating DJs she'd go out to all the nightclubs and on Facebook you'd see her she'd always stick her tongue out she was like a bad girl okay it's like very bad very like you if you looked at her she's like oh yeah she's she gets around okay and then like this I see on Facebook she's married with kids all her she's deleted almost all of her friends this is like almost like this like flipped a switch deleted all of her friends I'm I'm still one of her friends I guess because she didn't delete me I don't use Facebook that much by the way and all the pictures that I saw were her from partying drinking drunk a lot of foreign guys too now there's this really nice gentle looking Japanese guy and two kids and now she's a mother and this happened like in the space of like a year it's just amazing how the switch just turned her personality completely changed from when she was young until she and and now she went not now she's an accredited nurse she's completely changed her life I don't know how that happened and in Japan there's just a switch that goes off and that's how relationships work so for me as a foreigner living here it was very hard for me to figure out does this person like me because I'm I'm foreign or because I can't speak Japanese or because I'm English I'm an English teacher or because they are just curious what that's when what I told you before stop looking at yourself and start looking around you that you could notice why does this person like you you know and then this is when you did this is when you start finding really nice people and yeah I was really lucky to find my wife but dating in Japan has always been really hard because you you don't know that for a foreigner if they're looking for fun if they're looking for our relationship or if they're looking for marriage it's hard to tell I guess it's like that and I know all the places but it's very hard here because you don't know that it's they have different signs and once again I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna end this with one story that's very very important okay I got marry I had a girlfriend that I traveled a lot with in 2002 we traveled around the world I met her in Germany really nice girl at least that's what I thought during the course of the nine months that we backpacked at the end of the trip she told me that she hated me and I didn't understand why and this is normal actually she I wasn't really looking at looking for signs I thought if she had a problem she would tell me right but I guess I was supposed to notice her signs because she said that for the last six months we talked to so many people in English and she felt like like an outsider and I didn't help her enough to communicate although she could speak English she didn't feel comfortable and I didn't notice these and for the last six months she had hated me and then we we ended up splitting up after all of these travel experience and I'm like what a waste why didn't you say something earlier why didn't you tell me that you are uncomfortable that's the way I would have hoped that it would work but I also should have probably noticed some of the signs I probably should have stopped and turned to her and look and see are you okay do you understand and [Music] that was something that I learned to about in Japan you have to really people aren't always going to tell you how they feel most Western women are sick I like again geez comment most most most women or men are not gonna straight-up tell you that they feel bad or they feel sad or they feel upset you have to stop and listen and turn and and look at them and kind of kind of sense them and I can't say you should never fall in love I think that that my experience has been here in Japan it you have to be able to communicate with whoever is your wife or your girlfriend and you have to find ways to do that and if you come from a different culture it's gonna be twice as hard single is the way to go we got a lot of people here that aren't gonna be getting married anytime soon but nothing yeah it's very hard to pick up the the differences or the signs from someone who's from a different culture and it's easier to date men look at really why am i reading the comments these are dangerous ones but for me it I wasn't until I guess seven seven or eight years and that I really started to understand a little bit more how this is the reason why I'm I didn't get married until I was 44 there were chances that I could have gotten married I thought I was gonna marry the girl that I was traveling with 15 18 years ago 7 as many years ago but I didn't really I didn't really understand it and and now at 44 I'm understand it very very well and to me these lessons our stuff I think every adult should probably had figured out on their own but I think being here in Japan and not having not having my American friends here was maybe a good thing I don't know I do think if I'd stayed and of course stayed in the United States and never came to Japan I often think what kind of a person would I be I'm pretty sure I'd be a lot fatter I'm pretty sure I'd feel a lot older I probably would I don't know what kind of job I'd be doing if I stay in the United States I certainly wouldn't be a youtuber because I wouldn't have the confidence to do it I wasn't very popular in high school I didn't have a girlfriend till I got to college I didn't I didn't have much confidence in myself until I came to Japan and that might be because in Japan if you're a westerner you're sort of looked at differently one thing that I saw a lot of people a lot of people commenting about racism was that I'm not I'm not white I'm not black either I'm like you know my mother's from India so I'm brown so this that the color of the skin that you see is you know is is India you know so I'm treated you can tell that I can tell that I'm treated differently than somebody who's white and I asked people this might be completely wrong and I'm not sure a chocolate I don't know momoka I don't know whatever Brown okay but I had an audition once and the guy the guy the producer said I wish you were wish I wish that you were white and in the industry that of acting and talent and things like this you you can never get upset about it because you you have to be it's not about equal opportunity and all that stuff it's about they're looking for somebody in the part and you could be wrong just based on your skin color that's fine but you can tell people that are white are treated differently than people that are black it was much more like this 20 years ago and I can see the shift to a lot more openness over the last 20 years I'm just being completely honest here I could be Greek I could be Indonesian people in Indonesia so that I sort of looked in I can look like a lot of things and I don't mind but being in between white and black I ain't got enough you can kind of say that you can feel that it's different yeah there's a lot of respect right now for India in in Japan having the biggest population having a growing economy there's a lot of cultural and there's a lot of socio-economic problems like a lot of poor versus the rich there's a huge gap in the middle class but India is a very respected country in Japan and getting more and more respect around the world and and I think Japanese see that too was in World War two this is what somebody told me okay I can't say that this is fact I want to give you that right now it's very important that I give you things that I think are as as truthful as possible I can't say that this is that this is this is not a fact but some of what somebody told me I'm building it up like that for a reason they said in World War two the Japan was conquered by the United States the Japan lost to the United States so they have a great amount of respect for the United States so they have a respect for that's one of the reasons where they have a respect for white people even though the United States is not the United States is the most diverse country in the world where people are every single color back then in World War two it was MacArthur the presidents were white everybody in power was white and they had a lot of respect for that because they were defeated by it and this is this is what somebody told me actually several people had told me and that were over the age of 60 on why Japan treats what has more respect for people that are white or European right why are they more fascinated by it it's because they were defeated in war by them and I never really got it but and I still don't I think it's stupid but this is the way older people the older generation might have to it's not gonna be everybody but this is what I was told and this is why and when I've had racism going back to the quest that was asked to me like an hour ago when I had places where I felt that there was racism or I never really get angry because once again anger is an emotion that's a huge waste instead smile don't agree with them mmm swallow your pride and let it go because you're not gonna change that person's mind and walk away and you know in a year or two down the line that person might be become your your friend and they might have changed the way that they see things you can't change people with anger you can't change people by getting angry at their ignorance but and this is what I've learned about just living here in Japan as an expat I used in America I was like everybody else and when you come here as an expat to any country you're different that means you have to learn the rules and you have to kind of assimilate but you never really can't I can't be Japanese because I don't look Japanese right it's it would be impossible so I don't try to be but what I can tell you is that you have to to swallow your pride sometimes on misunderstandings and not take it personally and over time if you can build a relationship with that person then you can change them and if it's not important to you and you're not gonna see this person again what difference does it make but getting angry never really made or solved or changed anybody it just gets people more upset and then those prejudices that they had are just almost like validated right so if you get angry because somebody is just ignorant you're just validating their ignorance I think and that's that's I've always taken the approach where if someone is ignorant or stupid I swallow my own pride and say it's not about me it's about them all right they're the ones that are dumb right yeah I'm not gonna I'm not I know it's what's right and wrong they're the ones that are dumb I'm gonna swallow my pride and that's how I get through these difficult situations and they and they do pop up as an expat every single expat around the world has situations where they've had they were put in this whether it was a good situation or a bad one I'll tell you what um I'm gonna tell you a little quick story I worked my first year in a place called Okazaki and the next teacher that came was a very beautiful african-american woman from New York whose father was an Olympic medalist I believe she had he was very strong powerful man and she came to Japan to teach she was she was a singer as a hobby she wasn't especially popular she was I mean she was not popular talented she wasn't as an especially talented singer but in Japan she felt like a superstar never mind the fact that her parents were very successful and she was a very strong looking woman she looked like she sang very good R&B she wasn't talented but she was okay but here she felt like a star and she started getting delusions of grandeur like I remember teaching her and after one week and everyone would be clap and then say how great she is and how she should be a professional singer she started to believe them there's something called oh say G in Japanese do you know do you know this expression oh say G oh say G is like an honest lie it's a compliment to be agreeable oh say G is like oh you're so good at using chopsticks they don't really feel like that but they want to make you feel happy so they complement you this is oh say G okay and if you start believing all of the little lies to make you feel comfortable at you're a superstar and not realize that they're just sort of just to make you feel happy you start to feel like you're a superstar then you have completely people completely missed missed they're there they're a little little compliment to book the to believe that they actually felt like that and now here she is this new teacher with an amazing pedigree her father was an Olympic gold medalist but a medalist she told me that I couldn't validate that but here she is in Japan and now she decides to quit the English school after one month and become a professional singer I'm telling this is true oh say G right so she tries to go up professional singer and the last that I heard was it she got she got in trouble with certain underworld groups and one thing that's enough to another and she ended up back in the night say it's a broken person because the the entertainment industry just completely beat her up but it all started with OS AG which is so dangerous in the United States if you if you compliment a person it usually is because it's true or you you you want something from them okay but usually we can kind of figure that out in Japan people will compliment you left and right and especially if you're a guest or a foreigner here people compliment you for everything oh you're you're you're Japanese they say I said corn eat you up oh your Japanese is so good Wow you're Japanese how did you study nihongo in school is like just speaking English to you so they'd really don't think your Japanese is good if they thought your Japanese was good they've speaking Japanese to you right well this is called sa G and they do it to make you feel good and it works it cuz they're really good at it they're really good at making you feel good this is one of the reasons why Japanese are really good hosts because they know how to make you feel special right but people buy into it and if they get delusions of grandeur especially new foreigners that come here that if you thought that you were talented a little bit before you came to Japan and then you came to Japan you're gonna think that you're a rock star and I I had to admit I didn't have a lot of confidence before I came to Japan and I did but my confidence all right and I think a lot of you might realize this through my shows my confidence came from entertaining children yeah they feed up on your ego exactly deep purple's got it exactly right yeah I think if you don't know though if you're somebody coming from the west and you're thinking about yourself all the time it's very hard for you to just shift and start thinking about the other person and give them a say G right so when people compliment me I like it just bounces off me and I go right back at them and I find other things to compliment them because I know I know the game the game's up everybody yeah if you compliment me you expect to get complimented twice back alright that's how the game works but you can just say thank you and move on but it's very easy to to feel like a rock star I felt like a rock star to kids okay I showed I was showing you pictures do you guys you remember for those those who are joining me now I'm sorry um the compliment battle exactly for those who are joining me now I I was showing the pictures before let's see here oh there's my friend Tom if you saw from the DC right here that's my friend Tom who was at the wedding oh there's my telephone card collection check it out oh this is awesome it's a lot of telephone cards I made a lot of international calls alright where were these where the kids I hear they got here's some of them so here's here's some of them so like these people made me feel like rockstars and I in turn tried to make them feel like rockstars and I get a lot of confidence look at this picture I was just so happy and I felt a lot of confidence from everybody making me feel confident and I tried to do the same and return by making them feel confident and and that's how I kind of learned how the game works beautiful telephone cards yeah so don't buy into the hype of oh say gee everybody oh say gee is how it said oh SE j i know this word when you come to japan expect hey if you're gonna be a traveler expect to be complimented for no apparent reason other than people want to make you feel happy earthquakes front of GX traits in here all right but all right with the earthquakes yeah the first time I was in an earthquake was here in Tokyo in 1998 and it was a magnitude 5 in Chiba and we were at Tokyo Disneyland and at a restaurant nearby and the first thing I did was jump underneath the table and I thought this is what you're supposed to do and all my Japanese friends were just laughing their butts off because it's like well what the heck are you doing why are you underneath the table and say god I'm just checking something but they knew that I felt the tremor too because they did as well the bill that was waiting for for crying out loud the building was going like this so my reaction was to jump underneath the table and I did and yeah they thought it was pretty funny yeah now I know before the earthquake happens a kind of what the magnitude is gonna be especially after the big big one when in in March 11 2011 when that earthquake hit I you knew right away on on the first movement it was gonna it was something different and now when we have earthquakes I know that this is just an earthquake it's not a big one you can tell I've been in hundreds of earthquakes now and you can just tell and I no longer jump underneath the table but maybe you should especially if you if you don't have that the experience then jump underneath the table or go to the bathtub or do something that you were taught to do because that's the way you should do it um what's the secret behind your youthful look immaturity immaturity maybe eat eat well exercise don't eat a lot of meat maybe I don't know I eat less I still eat a lot of meat but I eat less than I would if I was in the United States I don't overeat I exercise and yeah I'm I'm not immature but I have fun smile and and don't take things seriously all the time yeah of course you got to take stuff seriously but don't take stuff seriously all the time and try to in the worst situations find something something to laugh about and yeah you probably will stay a little bit younger I don't ever you say a lot younger but maybe a little bit enjoy life right enjoy life how old are you 44 I be young at heart never stop learning never close yourself off get out of your bubble get out of your safe zone and go do something have the courage to do something that you didn't think that you could do and should prove it to yourself that you can still do it because that's what kids do kids are always outside of their bubble and somehow as adults we live inside of a place of comfort and we don't go out enough and we don't change our situation and I'm when I got married I'm outside my but my comfort zone 44 years of freedom and now I'm married right I don't I don't look at it as I was losing freedom though but yeah you have to be able to take take chances and move outside of your bubble and and learn new things and that keeps you young to meet new people laughs not don't be afraid do you plan to have kids yeah sometime I she has a lot more time than I do I'm she's 31 I'm 44 so marriage is a complete ultimate ocg maybe it could be I'm not joining anybody's bubble what do you mean I don't know what that means and if you saw the bubble the bubble boys in the episode from a couple months ago in Toyo su that's pretty funny they were literally inside of a bubble and it looked like a lot of fun I might join you in that kind of a bubble um what are you doing next week John and a lot of people are asking me for meetups I'm literally editing the videos I'm so behind in the only in Japan main Channel episodes of my men but I'm editing a video that's very important and I can't make a mistake on it so I've been confirming and reshooting a lot of scenes just to make sure that I don't get any of the information wrong because if you make a wrong if you if you publish something that's wrong you get a lot of trouble the next one is about capsule hotels but the history of it and why they're all male and there's a couple of aspects of it that I don't want to get wrong so but that that episode should be up probably before the weekend which I'm really excited about I don't have a lot of time for meetups gosh everybody like right now I should be working in fact I'm gonna end this livestream and then I was looking at the time how I've been doing this there's a lot of a lot of work that I have to catch up on because of the honeymoon I just didn't have a lot of time to make the main channel stuff as well as I got to do a lot of stuff I'm Way behind a lot of stuff but I know if I just keep going forward it'll all get done yeah let me see here I I've been I'm planning to go to Germany this winter I'm looking forward to the DVD thank you for asking about that I have an update coming based on the last update the update should be today so the DVD I'm gonna be very happy when I get that finished ever been to Kobe like a hundred times I used to live next to Kobe it's a little bit in a place called kakegawa kakegawa Higashi cuckold Gow actually and I would change trains at Nisha Akashi to go to Col Bay so I know the area quite well take the Shinkai Seoul ku up there yeah um don't forget to like this stream everybody hey yeah thanks a lot you can click the like button always helps um where do you get the best value in hotels in Tokyo Jose I'm not sure people but this is another thing I think I've learned over the 20 years I'm gonna actually sit up here howling ninety ninety minutes of sitting like that really really is hard okay and this is pretty good this way yeah there yeah alright so um a lot of people been asking me this question this doesn't have to do with the 20 years that I lived here but maybe it does where do you get value I don't know what the what value you mean the thing with Japan is pretty much you get what you pay for the services people don't tip in Japan so you don't have to tip for that so you don't have to add on 20 percent everything it is the price is what the price is basically what the price is is what you get for it what does it mean by value do you want to be close to the station do you want to be far from the station do you not care are you willing to pay more to be near there or less to be magista pends on on the type of person that you are and what you're looking for your hotel when I went on honeymoon I stayed at at three different hotels one of them was called the stones on kuta beach one of them was called maya ubud which was a resort that was really beautiful and the other one was the intercontinental in jimbaran which was also a little bit pricey all three of those hotels have have a lot of stars in it but when it came to value it was very hard to see if if the price was justified or not everything was just a little bit different I can tell you one thing though capsule hotels are very popular but I can't really recommend staying in them I don't I never understood why tourists would want to stay in one of those I think it's just to feel what it's like but for the same amount of money you can stay in a normal hotel so just about I think it might be ten dollars more you can stay in a business hotel like Appa hotel or another one of the chains would whatever you because I know Appa hotel is somewhat comfortable controversial you could stay wherever you want for like five thousand to six thousand yen you can stay in a cap so tells like four thousand of the four 4,500 yen these days so value for money depends on where you want to stay what you want to see your personality how you how you want to do things Airbnb is is pretty cool but then everyone there's risk to Airbnb as well here in Japan just you know the language barrier as well I don't know it's it's such a hard thing to say to recommend a hotel I always recommend the Gate Hotel in Asakusa alright I recommend staying in Asakusa because it's a really convenient place with a lot of history it's got the Ginza line which takes you straight to Shibuya it's not far from way no it's not far from a lot of the cultural areas it's not it's walking distance to Akihabara so I always say asakusa is the best place to stay or this area we know is a neat place to stay as well with the hotels are a little bit cheaper Kudo my as well as okay Chu machi I think is a really good place to stay because it's very good life around I'm a local market so I don't know hotels is a hard thing for me to say talk about when it comes to value thank you for your answer you're very welcome I'm sorry I couldn't answer it directly but if you do stay at our do con and I see in a couple of these places manga cafe but you're gonna feel you're gonna feel tired the next day I think if you're if you're an adult manga cafe is really hard to live in you know but you can do it for me personally I'd rather have a nice hotel room with a with a nice comfortable bed and a good pillow and I'm fine I don't need the Intercontinental Hotel that's good for honeymoon but I just need a bed a window and clean sheets and a clean room best and just get me out of that hotel I don't go there for the services business hotels are usually pretty pretty clean here when I was younger I used to stay in love hotels if I traveled with my girlfriend and we were going somewhere after 10:00 p.m. they have something called a stay and they were very for if you want to talk about value I'll tell you this honestly love hotels are a steal after 10:00 p.m. you can stay there for five thousand yen five to six thousand yen outside of Tokyo you get a jacuzzi you get a big-screen TV off in a kataoka machine you get there's a lot of other side benefits I don't want to talk about that's up to you if you want to buy them inside of the room I never did but you get a lot of a lot of those rooms are pretty neat in in the left hotels you can stay there after 10:00 p.m. and you have to leave I guess around 8 a.m. which works out pretty good but once you go into a love hotel and you enter the room you cannot leave the room to go out to get something at a convenience store you're in for the night just keep that in mind okay ah yeah the jacuzzis were pretty neat and and this being Japan the rooms are usually very very clean I say usually there might be some situations where they're not but for the most part they're very very clean I actually have to go back to start editing this video but can you stay there alone I don't think so that would be a little bit weird you can stay there with a guy friend if you just just tell him you're looking for a place to crash they might be ok with it but usually it's it's for two people I don't think you could stay there alone if you want to stay alone that's why capsule hotels are made there places where you can crash for solo travelers that's sort of the reason for the capsule hotel see here any other questions it depends it's a gray area I've seen you order women to come to your room I don't know anything about that Professor it could be new wrestling video oh you know what let me go back to the professor they're inside of the phone booths back twenty years ago there used to be stickers and there'd be girls on the stickers and these stickers had a phone number and apparently if you call them and they would come to your room but I don't see those stickers anymore inside the phone booths because everything is going online and I don't you don't have to see that if you don't want to so back in the 20 years ago was very very in-your-face in the phone booths you saw every single girl who wanted to hook up for a price they were in the phone booths next to the phone which made it very convenient it was kind of funny that way that that's what you might be referring to now yeah or magazines I guess Jean is writing it here throw tokyo for tourists killed gosh that's hard you know what it's not kill tour tokyo i reject that and I'm gonna say Kansai Kansai over Tokyo okay can I say that if you're a first time come into Japan skip Tokyo go to Kansai three reasons actually there could be as many as you want but I can I can think of three right now one Tokyo is very crowded because the Olympics there's a lot of buzz around it hotels are more expensive and they're harder to find to outside of Tokyo there's some really good day trips but Tokyo is just Tokyo Kansai is loaded there's nada there's there's him AG there's there's Osaka there's Kobe there's there's Wacha Yama there's so many places to go inside the Kansai region that are just hardcore Kanazawa is not that far away mount Dyson is not that far away from Osaka you can do quick day trips to hit Oshima from Kansai so you know concise very you can do day trips from constitute Tokyo as well but if you were gonna position yourself in the center of Japan Kansai would be the place to be I live in Tokyo I should be talking great about Tokyo but conte is is Fukushima good I know you're being facetious but Fukushima has a history of being them one of the most natural places and away from where the radiation is now I'm being dead serious away from where that is inside of the mountains places like izu Wakamatsu is one of the most beautiful places in Japan with a history of being the samurai town awesome nihonshu awesome sake a very very very traditional Japanese place and they've got a lot of tourists already so they don't they don't need to push too much for tourism which is why I think it would be good for you to go there there's no problems Koriyama is very beautiful Yama Cory Yama the quarry Yama is is a nice place it's sort of the places around Koriyama are very the city itself is just a city but it's the places around Koriyama which are very nice Fukushima is you know it's one of the biggest prefectures and I made an episode about this there's the place that you shouldn't go to and then there's the rest of the prefecture which is just not any different here's the thing folks everyone is so fixated on the name Fukushima you could go from Fukushima to Tokyo and if you draw a line up here you're still in Fukushima you're still in Fukushima but you're it's just just as far as Tokyo so there's there's no difference between the prefecture of Fukushima out of the mountains then there is with the city of Tokyo or there is going up north all right you're still in the same radius of a few hundred couple hundred kilometers okay so there's that you know I know people are being facetious cuz you hear the name Fukushima you think of bad things it's not like that at all don't go to the site where the but I have a friend who's a youtuber named Joe Habib and he went there because he was curious into the place where he could go and he he did okay he didn't have a bad time I guess curiosity is another thing but I I respect the area I'm not gonna go to the towns that you shouldn't go to because this is where I live this is you know um what do you think about Okinawa love it it's awesome you should go there's very cheap flights from Tokyo on Jetstar and some of the budget airlines Skyy mark you can take you can do a round trip to Okinawan for like a hundred dollars okay it's really cheap so it's a side trip that you can do from from Tokyo for a couple of days if you wanted to stay in one of the islands and then come back Okinawa has amazing culture and the songs and the music there it's so it sticks in your head it's like when you and then when you hear the music you want to go back to Okinawa there's so good at making you feel that spirit of the Okinawa spirit you feel it and that's a reason why I think you should go to okey now I'm gonna try to do some videos on Okinawa this this year and next year so you'll see more content on it okay now is so reggae in any tropical island you play some Bob Marley dude it's some reds at some reggae which is the best mode of transport to travel across Japan for tourists train for locals car because there's a lot of places Japan is a car culture they have great trains but Japan is a car culture people take their cars seriously it is Autocar very important and as a tourist you don't see that renting a car travelling around Japan is probably something that's that's uh you might want to do because it's a different way to see the country if you're a repeater to Japan this is your second a third time try renting a car getting an international driver's license and seeing a different side of Japan through rent-a-car it makes a big difference because you can get to more spots outside of the city it's much more convenient Avery I want to thank you for the super chat does Abba City have the same temperatures as New York in the winter I guess so you know why you know why I say I guess so because if you said if you compared Abba city to Canada the Canadians are cracking up they were laughing so hard when I said temperatures get down to a very frigid -10 degrees and people of Canada are going like this because they know that the temperature is like minus 50 up there in Canada there's like - chunks like spring for us you know so I would say it's kind of it's kind of close maybe they're not in New York City but Albany I think Albany or Buffalo is sort of similar to abash et al machine he was cold - for me can I Drive on my favorite side of the road I don't know what your favorite side of the road is people drive here on the left side and then the us on the right side so there's that did you meet Yakuza yes I met Yakuza when I hitchhiked Yakuza member picked me up from the Yamaguchi clan and he was very friendly he was very nice spoke English showed me his tattoos we took a bath together one of the most respect respectable people that I meet I don't know what he does outside of the time that we spent together but extremely friendly and curious about people from other countries so and I've met people that were maybe in it here in Tokyo as well in clubs and they were always very respectable and you treat them with respect as well just like anybody else did they have all their fingers intact I really wasn't looking at their hands I guess so I didn't I didn't really look I did notice the tattoos and that complement people on tattoos too because in the u.s. we have a culture a lot of people get tattoos for fashion and in Japan it's still not the culture here that's one thing I think I've learned to accept Japan just has a Japan solution for things okay Japan is different they have their own way of doing things and you have to respect the way that they want to do things the same at the United States the same with every country the laws sometimes make no sense go by there the laws so you just sort of work work with that you know you just work with that okay well I want to thank everybody I was extorted by the Yakuza Wow well I wasn't I mean I never really had him realms at all actually but I've never had any problems the people that I met that that said that they were we're very very kind and and if you treat each other if you treat other people with respect it usually will reciprocate that's what I've learned sorry to ask you been how have you handled your American taxes over the last 20 years not very well I should probably it there's an exemption for making a certain amount of money and I never go over the exemption so it's not too hard okay taxes is an expat or something that's that's very important it's your civil duty to pay your taxes the the the the US taxes are probably the US tax system is probably the worst in the world I guess they try to be fair and in doing so the I don't really understand it Japanese taxes are so much simpler than working with with this I look I totally respect I don't know if I'm going to audit it or not but I totally respect that we have to do our civil duty and pay so it's the same with in Japan but you have an exemption here in Japan think it's like 96 thousand dollars or so and I've of course I never make over you know that amount of money so you don't have to pay anything to to unless you exceed that so why are you asking anyways so the Kuril Islands dispute nowadays it's political I really don't know I don't I'm neither I'm just a guy here in Japan hello from Texas could you do another big night food run I will I love midnight snack so something I will do all right two hours of this is enough 20 years in Japan probably be here for another 20 more Japan is has grown on me to the point where it's home I'll never be Japanese I never really want to be Japanese I don't know what the word weeaboo means I don't I never really understood that I'm not trying to be Japanese I'm just somebody who lives here who has a great appreciation of somebody who loves history and it's always gonna be a part of me now just because I've been here for so long and I've seen and experienced so many amazing things a lot of them I've shared with you through the show that I've been doing but I want to thank everybody for the support this channel has been going on for five years and it's kind of cool that we get a chance to get to know one another over this time I get to know a lot of people through your chats this has been the greatest thing about this experiment called live-streaming that I've been doing for the LAT for over a year now is that I've gotten a chance to interact with you and getting to know you and I can and as a result I can bring you closer to Japan and I hope that you can feel a little bit closer through this show and this is my 20th anniversary and it feels good to share that with you guys are you on Twitch not yet but it looks like something that I will be doing maybe by the end of this summer so yeah congratulations thank you love you too I appreciate you watching this I can't believe you guys are watching this boring two hours but I've learned a lot there's a lot of stuff I didn't talk about yet that's good because I've got so many stories that I will bore you with with adventures from all corners of Japan this summer I'm gonna be going to Singapore for Meetup I'll be there from August 16th to August 20th I'll be in Korea for a YouTube summit from August 21st to August 24th so there's a chance that we can do a meet-up if you're in Korea that'll be kind of fun I haven't been in Korea for many many years so it'll be nice to go back it's it's our neighbor just just the other side so that should be fun to be in Seoul so that's gonna be very busy summer please do keep in touch leave me a comment below I usually will read the comments in the first couple of hours and respond to you you are you are all who are watching this a very big part of this series this live show is a product of us and what we want to see and what we want to do and what we want to talk about and when you give chats here you can kind of shape a live stream and that's what really makes this kind of fun for me too it's fresh it's exciting and that's why although the quality might not be always perfect it's always gonna be really fun for me and I hope it is for you because that's the way I kind of want to make this show I don't know if this has been useful this information this is more about me also kind of reflecting on the 20 years that I've been here but it's also a part of my history and in 20 years I can look back on this and then see how I've changed as a person to fun alright have a good day and a good night wherever you wherever you are in the world um uh yeah that's all I have to say about that bye everybody I'll be back at a live stream so I'm sure I'll see you again soon

Channel: ONLY in JAPAN * GO

Views: 389,763

Rating: 4.6984282 out of 5

Keywords: Only in Japan, Japan, John Daub, Living in Japan, Working in Japan, Life in Japan

Id: cqGu429Q1Ec

Length: 117min 42sec (7062 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2018