Welcome to the new John Daub * ONLY in JAPAN Channel Pretty exciting, right? Subscribe and definitely join us for an adventure of a lifetime. I will take you to every single corner of this amazing country. In this episode, I want to talk about where the ONLY in JAPAN series came from. Its past, the present, the future and a little bit about myself. First of all, I want to start off by talking about the WAO RYU!ONLY in JAPAN channel. I will not be uploading any more content onto that channel. It's owned by another company. We talked for a long time to try to find a way to positively continue the channel together but there was just a difference in the programming, the direction that we wanted to take -- the content. However, I have to go in my own direction now and I really wish that company a lot of success in its future endeavors. For this channel, I'm gonna be taking you all over Japan in a new format, a new style, a new opening. It's gonna be really exciting to start again. This journey that I've just had a lot of passion about teaching you about Japan. And where did that all start? In 2011, after the great Tōhoku earthquake, that was--event that changed the lives of a lot of people --not just me. The lives of the people here in Japan, and from that, ONLY in JAPAN was born. I went up with a couple of friends to--to volunteer food runs, dig the mud out of some of the houses. It really moved me a lot and it was hard --hard to do that and so many of my friends, my foreign friends had gone home. Tourists were not coming to Japan. There was just a lot of-- --a lot of-- negativity with this country when the word, "Fukushima," was being said and that broke my heart as someone who had lived in Fukushima, so-- In 2012, I came up with the name "ONLY in JAPAN" which actually is not a positive name. -- when we say "Only in Japan" for something that's negative or misunderstood about this country, it's just something that could only happen here. So, I wanted to take that phrase and make it positive by something that's only in Japan. And in this series, I will be explaining to you all of the positives, all of the things that I think are beautiful and the misconceptions about this country. Whether it's history, culture, adventure, food, technology. There's a whole range of topics that we're gonna be covering. Let me go all the way back to the beginning, though. I came to Japan in 1998 as an English teacher for children. Children are great because they're very direct and being able to teach children introduced me to the Japanese family, which it's--it's very-- For me, being an American, it was--it really was a culture shock to get to know how families run in Japan. It's quite different. So, the first six years teaching children was an amazing experience within this company that I worked for. I moved 16 different times around the country from Hiroshima to Fukushima and a lot of cities in between, and I got a chance to see the countryside and really get to know the people. That's where a lot of that passion comes from when I make this episode. It comes from having lived in the countryside, lived in different regions of this country. After I finished teaching English, I moved to Tokyo in 2004 but my career in video started in 2003, when I bought a Sony PD170 camera and I hitchhiked the entire length of Japan from Wakkanai in the north, down to Kagoshima in the south, and it was after that trip that I decided that I wanted to stay in Japan because of that omotenashi spirit. Japanese people who picked me up, invited me into their houses and-- --and showed me their lives. They took me to the destination exactly where I wanted to go and I've never seen so--such kindness before to strangers. So, I really didn't want to go after that. I just fell in love with this place so much and I set up a company in 2005 here in Tokyo, after my career in teaching to make video content. Back then, YouTube had not started yet. It was a new platform and started in 2006, so, the internet and this kind of medium didn't exist, but Steve Jobs held up an i-- iPod video and that inspired me so much, I knew that the future would be on mobile video. That's when I started my company and I started to put educational material under the name of Weblish (Web English) into this and it became extremely popular. So much so that I was getting more bandwidth from the iTunes channel than Sony Music was at the time here in Japan, which is crazy, right? The problem with that was that I had to pay for it all and bandwidth was not cheap in 2007-- --2008, I was giving away--I had to pay for people to download my show by paying for the bandwidth. Thankfully, we don't have to do that on YouTube. I love my life here in Japan. This country has been so good to me and each episode really is my gift to Japan. I really want to meet the people and tell their stories and because of the last few months that we've all been struggling with this pandemic, a lot of people here are hurting, and once again, this being my home, I want to try to make a focus of this channel to introduce you to small businesses, introduce you to local areas, get off of the beaten path and get out there to places where there are such amazing stories that have not been told yet and I'm gonna dig them out for you. And it's just an honor to have a channel on this platform and wherever I go in Japan, there's often a tourist or a visitor who comes to say hi to me. Nothing brings me greater pride in my work than to have somebody notice me on the streets as a result of the effort that I put into these videos. Thank you to each and every one of you who has subscribed and watched or been impacted by a video that I made. I've been producing videos for a very long time. Starting in 2003, hitchhiking the entire country, making that into a film. And then in 2005, by riding a bicycle down the Tōkaidō, the old Tōkaidō highway between Tokyo's Nihonbashi and Kyoto and making so many videos, productions, I think I've been on over 500 location shoots, 50 episodes of NHK's Tokyo Eye. This series is a continuation of my love of Japan and I hope that from now and over the years, I can not just earn your subscription and earn your trust in information about Japan, but I really want it to seem like you are on a trip with me. I am taking you out to these remote areas of the country. Places, corners that you would never have known about unless you had watched this show. That's what brings me the greatest amount of pleasure in producing a series on YouTube and producing a travel show. Whether it's food, adventure, technology, culture, history. All of these things are such an integral part of this amazing country that I call Japan and why this series is called ONLY in JAPAN. Now that it's under the title of John Daub, my name, which is signed in my reputation behind it, I could do even more and I'm so happy to have you along for the ride. Leave me a comment below. Please do subscribe if you like the work that you've seen in the past and are as excited about me about the future of this channel. Hit that like button to encourage me to keep making videos and if you ever think about coming to Japan, send me a message to say hi because you never know where I'm gonna be. I'm all over the country. New episode coming soon!
