Flax's Japan Diaries | Triforce #330

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Hello, everyone.

Welcome back.

Hi, mate.

To the Trifles podcast.

Oh, hi, mate.

Konichiwa, friends.

Oh, yeah, he's back.

He's back.

Pyrrhion is Japanese now.

He's turned full Japanese.

He's been away.

This is is what happens when you go.

You know, it's happened to us.

Yeah.

We became weebs by proxy.

You do?

Whatever.

So I haven't become a weeb.

I still hate anime.

That to me.

Something's never changed.

Indeed.

But I've sort of written an essay about

my time in Japan.

It's not an essay essay.

It's more like...

Like a memoir, like a portillo story.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Very much like a portillo story.

Pyrrhion's Japanese memoir.

I called it Flax Japan Trip Diary for Triforce.

Real catchy name.

That's good.

Yeah, that's.

Is there an acronym for that?

Fudge to duff.

Fujteduf.

Fudge the Dufte.

Because there's a food on the end.

Fuj de dufte.

Yes.

Fudge the dufte.

Fujtadifte.

Before I went away, Lewis, he said to me, please keep a diary of stuff

because I know that you'll see stuff that you'll want to talk about and forget.

There's so much that happens every day.

Exactly.

It's a lot.

Yeah, because you'll constantly be like, oh, what was that thing I wanted to talk about?

And then

I made a bunch of notes.

Shall I just

go in and you guys interrupt whenever?

Yeah, yeah.

Honestly, this is what we've been waiting for.

Me and Sips have been sitting here for three weeks waiting for you.

And then we're going to interrupt like crazy.

Yeah.

I haven't even eaten or I haven't slept nothing.

I'm so sorry.

No.

I kept you guys waiting.

I'm sorry.

On Tenterhooks.

Well, I was there for two weeks.

I got back on Sunday.

It was a bloody long trek.

It was a good 24 hours of travel time.

So

because getting to the airport, waiting for the flight, getting on the plane, every time we had a flight, it was on the runway for an hour to an hour and a half because they'd like, oh, we've got to wait.

So every flight was extended by like a good percentage, which was really annoying.

That's it.

And then Abu Dhabi was seven hours and then getting off the plane, three hours till our connecting flight, getting on the plane again, and then, you know, sitting on the runway and then 10 hours in the air and then landing and getting out, getting getting the baggage, getting on the train to Buckinghokyo.

It was just so much travel.

It's so much.

But it was worth it.

And like I said to my kids, once it's over, although it sucks at the time, all you'll remember is the holiday.

And you'll think, oh, man, the journey was long.

But it's not, it doesn't, it's so little happens.

It doesn't form any lasting memory.

Well, also, you watch a TV show normally.

Exactly.

You're watching something, right?

You're watching the entire season of the expanse or whatever.

I chose Mad Men, which I hadn't really watched much of.

I've watched a bit of it, but I didn't at the time.

It's a good one.

I was watching another stuff.

It is good.

I'm really.

But so that was the flight.

But moving on,

honestly, I would say before I went, a friend of mine who went last year or a couple of years ago with a friend of ours,

he said that it was the closest thing to being on another planet and basically meeting another civilization as possible.

So I'm not trying to say that the Japanese are aliens.

I would be the alien in every sense in this scenario.

No, yeah.

Culturally, it is so different.

It is so different.

Yeah.

And at times, I was asking myself, like, what are we doing in the UK?

Because it felt like they were so far ahead of us in so many ways.

But there are also ways that they're quite backwards.

But I'll come to all that, I guess.

Starting with trains.

The trains are amazing.

They're fast.

They're clean.

They're on time.

The connections are crazy.

You can get like anywhere between cities and towns.

And the Shinkansen bullet train system itself is so is such an achievement a genuine achievement that you think why don't we have something like that and the reason is that when they were building it and working it out and all the rest of it in the 60s which was the time to do this kind of stuff we were still ordering british rail was still ordering steam trains for some of their routes that is how far behind our trains are compared to japan um they are not that cheap the shinkansen is quite expensive um but it's so amazing if america had something like this it would change travel for them.

And really, so many of the states are so flat and there's so much land, you think bullet trains there seem like custom-made for America.

I know.

But I guess they've just gone with planes instead.

But it's such a shame because if you think about what they call the flyover states in the middle of America, you could have a Shinkansen line running.

fully east to west in the U.S.

And you'd only have trouble when you got to sort of places like the Rocky Mountains, which I'm sure would be a fucking nightmare to have to tunnel through.

You wouldn't be able to do do it, but you'd surely be able to find some way.

But it would just be transformative because these trains are so fast.

I have videos of us on the train.

I'm just filming out the window.

And it feels like you're in a jet plane.

And it's not noisy.

And the seats are so spacious.

And it's so clean and wonderful.

I just couldn't believe it.

It really did feel like we were in the future, even though they've been around for ages, which was really surprising to me.

But there are some things about them, like

with all that modern stuff, and as well as all the Blade Runner style neon everywhere and like all of that kind of big, big, big light and loud that Japan is, it also feels quite old-fashioned in a lot of ways.

It's quite a conservative country, culturally speaking, as well.

But it's in terms of the bureaucracy of things.

When we bought our JR rail tickets, which are not all they're

sort of made out to be, I'd say, we thought, oh, a Japan rail pass that sounds like for 400 quid a pop, we'll be able to hop on any train we want, no problem.

Not true.

It only works on some lines and a bunch of lines you only discover later, oh shit, that doesn't work with this pass.

Or it does, but only at certain times of the day.

And it's quite sort of paper-based and you have to buy these supplementary tickets.

And I was just, it was a bit of a faff.

And their maps of the underground and everything is.

It really does bring to light just how good the tube map is

because it's just so much cleaner.

It really did feel quite quite arcane and and complicated um and the machines themselves it's probably just something you get used to when you look at them and use it all the time you know like for somebody who for somebody who doesn't use the tube that often i agree i think the map's good but the whole system for riding the tube is like if i was if i was like a 75 year old person

you'd have no chance like it'd be i don't know but it's pretty pretty rough you know you just tap it is pretty simple but it's it's simple because we we because we're like a bit more sort of able to to to use these systems and stuff i know for a fact that like my my mother-in-law for example would be hopeless at at using all this stuff like she's just sitting she's sitting in the background while we're doing all this stuff and she's just like

i don't know what's going on like i don't know

should we balance our uh transportation and and electronics around whether some old boomer can work it out probably not well there's a lot of them i don't don't know.

Obviously.

There are.

And I mean,

they do travel or try to, at least.

Yeah.

Well, maybe they could fucking put some money into it then and stop bitching about people trying to spend money on transport.

That would be

you have got a point in that it is nice

in certain places to just be able to use your debit card to go beep or, you know, and then

you are through.

And then

you get charged a point to where you beep out and everything.

Yeah.

Do you know what would be really good?

If you if you entered onto the line somewhere and it tracked you, it tracked your entry point, and then as you were leaving, it would beep you again and say, right, you owe us this much.

You put your card, you're done.

You don't need to like buy a ticket or figure it out or buy a data pass or whatever.

It does that in the cheapest.

Like, that's literally what it does on the London.

In Holland, yeah.

Like, you literally don't even have to pay when you get off.

You just beep your card, like, contactless when you get on.

You beep in, beep out, and it says, All right, this is the beat.

Beep and beep out.

So you're never touching anything.

And that's the oyster card as well.

I mean, the oyster card is you have to top it up.

See, I didn't know there was a beep in and beep out.

I was buying tickets and everything.

Like, it was annoying, too.

Well, because I didn't know.

Oh, so exactly.

That's what I'm saying.

It could be spelt out a bit better.

I mean, like,

I'm not useless at this stuff either, but I was still buying tickets and trying to figure out what tickets I needed and stuff because that's what I thought you had to do, but I wasn't told any different.

So I will say this.

I think you probably might find that you would because of course your kids don't all have like a phone no right yeah so i have to do it they would be yeah you would need to buy tickets for them anyway yeah yeah yeah um anyway so i think um

you might find perian that your jr rail pass that's designed for tourists to make it cheap or whatever and use free shinkansen and stuff is is overpriced for what you need yeah depending on your trip oh yeah

but but i think that like you know it is

you i think you can probably work it out the shinkansen isn't the cheapest thing

to go on.

But I mean, given that it would take an hour and a bit to get from Tokyo to Kyoto, which was the second place we went, on regular trains, it was like three and a half hours or something like that.

So we felt like, geez, do we want to sit on a train for another flight's worth of travel?

Fuck.

Oh, of course not.

No, I mean, absolutely.

And like, you know,

the other thing is, is, like Sips is saying, he didn't know so-and-so was an option and it wasn't clear.

I'm sure there's a cheaper way to do all this and a better way to do it.

I'm just saying, from my instinct looking at it, the fact we still had paper tickets, it alone felt kind of silly.

And there was a lot of tickets, like when you go on the underground, it's little, these little paper stubs.

And when you book a seat on the Shinkansen, we couldn't find a way to do it online.

You go to the station, go to a office, like with a desk, and you have to tell the guy which train and which seat you want to book.

And then he gives you an additional ticket.

that nobody ever checked, but it was basically like saying,

excuse me, I'm in seat C4, sir.

But even if there were empty seats, people would sit next to you because that's where they booked, which is another very Japanese thing.

They wouldn't just say, I'll go sit there and I'll move if it turns out it's someone's seat.

They would never do that.

To the letter sort of thing.

They're like, no, no, no, just in case, because it would be mortifying for them, I guess, to have to be to be sat in the wrong seat.

But also,

the guards, when they get on, there seem to be about four or five guards on each train just patrolling and making sure everything was okay and helping people out and checking tickets and stuff.

They bow when they enter the carriage, walk through the carriage, do the thing, open the door at the end of the carriage, turn around and bow again so they're like bowing to the entire carriage and i was like wow that's polite like that's crazy yeah gosh um but i would be so honored to be bowed to like oh dude just generally i was bowing they were we were bowing all over the place sometimes i was like beating the japanese lads to the punch at the bow i was bowing first and they were like oh i forgot to bow like

which is how

it was crazy

yeah a bowing competition yeah i was the other thing i found that was old-fashioned that's so funny was money the cash money.

Yeah, well, and the presentation of the money, too.

They do the bowing with the two-handed little

respectfully take it from you and hand it back to you and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, it all felt quite old-fashioned.

I quite liked it.

And when they give you the receipt and they're like,

and they hand you the receipt, and you have to take it with both hands.

And I'm like,

thank you so much for this receipt.

Yeah, I'm going to put it in the bin.

But the coinage, the paper money, it is quite funny to have like a 50,000 yen note on you and buy a coffee with a 10K note or whatever.

But a lot of the time at the shops as well, you put the money into like a machine and it spits out change.

And the change it spits out is so fucking annoying that you end up with all of these coins.

We had the one yen coin, which is, it's like the lightest coin.

It's like less than a fly's lunchbox, this thing.

It's absolutely minuscule light coin.

And it's worth an eighth of a penny, I think.

So

what is the point in this thing?

And like, the, I think the thousand yen note is like a fiver.

So, quite often we'd see something and you'd see a gosh, that's 10,000.

That's quite a lot.

And you'd be like, work it out.

Oh, wait, that's a Fiverr.

Yeah, we'll buy you those pair of shoes or whatever.

You know, it was crazy how cheap stuff was.

But yeah, I ended up, my pockets were just full of change.

So, half the time, the reason I think all these gacha machines, you know, you know, the gacha machines?

Yeah.

It's like the little balls that you, for anyone that doesn't know, it's like a gumball machine, but instead you get a little, you get them over there i mean they're popular over here now you get you get loads of them over here but they have like not in rooms full of oh no not in comparison yeah yeah you can you can get them and then the whole idea about them

has seeped into toys generally as well absolutely

you don't even know what you're getting it's just yeah like those lol toys we talked about it's all gacha yeah but i it's like 130 140 yen which is like 60p so you've got all all this change.

And we were just buying gachas with the change because it's just such a pain in the ass to do anything else with it.

So I came back with all these weird gachas, little toys and things.

There was one, this is so bizarre, tucked in amongst all this very Kawaii Japanese characters and collectibles and stuff, there's one which is pin badges of Billy Joel album covers.

Like that's it, that's a gacha.

And why?

And there was one that was, it was sushi, but it was Beatles sushi.

So it was the famous Allie road album cover but with the five with the four beatles as sushi and then a yoko own sushi and i've got one on my bag now and it's just like it's like it's got the little round glasses and a beaded necklace for i i assume that's i think it's meant to be ringo i can't be sure but it was just like why is that here man ringo

i now want all five like i really want imagine you're ringo and yet somebody's making like merchandise about you and stuff he's he's really lucky he's he he's really done a good job, hasn't he?

He has a sushi roll

in like the corner of a weird little kawaii little, you know, gacha place.

It is bizarre because you have to think, okay,

who designed this?

Who came up with this?

Right?

Like, who thought, okay, what we need is Beatles merch in the guise of sushi rolls, right?

That's like, and then we need to put them in a gacha machine because some crazy fucker wants to collect them all.

You know, it's almost like, are they, is it a meta thing of them deliberately thinking up the weirdest thing they can think of?

Because I felt like that a lot.

I think you're right.

And I think the reason is there's so many gatches that they're just like, fuck it, we'll just come up with something.

Like it's just all plastic toot that gets made in China.

And they're like, just come up with whatever.

So there are undoubtedly people sat around.

If it's all the same thing.

If it's all just cutesy little keychains of like anime characters, it gets boring fast.

You want it to be weird because it catches your eye.

One of them, for example, that we got was

the movie It.

It was these plastic figurines from the movie It.

It was all different versions of Pennywise the Clown.

Nice.

All his different forms.

And the one that we got was called Dead.

Pennywise Dead.

And it was him at the end of the movie, sort of slumped over with his, like, all melted.

And you have to assemble this thing.

And then now you've got this hideous dead Pennywise.

It was so strange, but it was like 60p, so who cares?

Like, it was just a bit of fun.

But that's where most of our change went anyway.

Um, what else?

Oh, so that is so crazy.

Yeah, did you buy much stuff from vending machines?

They love their vending machines.

Yes, um, well, so when we were there, the weather was about 38 degrees most days,

especially in Kyoto.

They're in the middle of a heat wave, so it's normally hot in Japan, and we've traveled to a lot of hot countries.

I'm okay in heat, but but this was excessive amounts of heat.

Like, I've not been in that level of heat for that length of time before.

Um, 38, and in the sun, it felt more like 40 41 in all honesty and the weather reports said the same it was like 38 degrees but with the humidity and if you're in the sun it feels more like 40 41 it's just murderous heat and you're just you're planning around like oh we'll come out of the station here and we'll walk to this place it's only a 10 minute walk but 10 minutes in this heat by the time you get there you've sweated out all your energy um and i had like like you get these UV umbrellas um and everybody has them and we bought them because if you don't have them, them, the sun is just punishing.

At midday, you're trying to get some lunch somewhere.

A lot of the time you have to queue up outside to get in.

You're just in this heat.

And you could just feel your life force dissipating into the atmosphere.

It's so brutal.

And there were things we wanted to do that we were like, oh, wait a minute, it's going to be outdoors.

Fuck that.

Like, we planned around being in AC because it's just too hot.

And we're staying in during midday.

Like, you know, it was.

It was really crazy.

But there were Japanese people walking around with long trousers and shirts and

raincoats.

At one point, it rained for like two seconds.

All the cyclists had their raincoats on.

It looked like protective gear for some kind of environmental cleanup.

That's how big their raincoats were.

Like full body raincoats with these huge headpieces to stop the rain getting in there.

They just, they don't want to get wet.

And who could blame them?

They must be melting in there.

Like, I know it gets hot in the summer in Japan.

Yeah, it's funny.

Yeah, you put on a raincoat so that you don't get wet, but then it's so big and hot that you're just, you're sweating so much underneath.

you're getting soaked anyway yeah you might as well just not have it on just get i mean probably get you'd probably be a bit cooler with the with the rubber hitting you yeah i mean i it rained like twice when we were there very small amounts um and everybody seemed to when it rained everybody seemed to panic and like really get off the street.

I was like, geez, how is this worse than the sun?

We were like, oh, thank God it's raining.

And we were like standing in the rain a little bit.

They did not want any part of it.

It was quite funny.

But yeah, it was blisteringly hot.

So that did kind of affect what we were able to do when we were there on the days when it was really, really hot.

But that aside, the AC, there's AC everywhere.

Every shop, every apartment, every restaurant, everything is AC'd up.

All the trains, all of the trains have.

I love a country that fully embraces AC.

Yeah, if it's that hot, I mean,

yeah, it was bad.

You just can't function when you're that hot.

Exactly.

Exactly.

We just kind of shut down.

But so I will say, in terms of prices, I couldn't believe how cheap everything was.

Like, getting there was not cheap.

The Airbnb accommodation was not cheap.

Getting around the country on the Shinkansen was not cheap, but the tube is cheap.

All the stuff you want to buy, your clothes, you know, all this merchandise, food was so cheap.

We went out for a meal.

It would be less than a tenor ahead.

Like easily less than a tenor ahead.

Tener ahead.

Easily cheap everywhere.

It's about average over here now, I think, if not more, depending where you're going.

10.

Well, I mean, if you're going somewhere that where like your young, young kids are going to eat stuff like Subway or something.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, this is like a nice restaurant.

Like, we went to this one place, it was like a bento place.

And uh, my eldest got this big, big sort of tray.

It had like gioza and rice, and it had a bit of soup, and it had some other bits and bobs, and it was a fiverr.

Jesus, and I was like, this is insane.

And this was not some McDonald's fast food place.

The McDonald's we went to over there, because of course you've got to try out the Mackeys in another country.

Um, was they had all kinds of stuff on the menu that I've never

seen.

You can get a beer and all the rest of it in pretty much everywhere.

Um,

went to the cinema, you can get a beer it was it was great

exactly um so uh everything talks to you was the thing that i was not prepared yes okay i'm i'm so glad you noticed this okay so oh i am i'm really just enjoying listening to your i know this is a little bit like for some people this might be like putting up with their elderly relatives holiday slides right but i'm glad you noticed that for a start that everything talks to you because it is it takes some getting used to and it's really so

weird right it's a lot and it's especially because it's all in japanese obviously so it's meaningless gibberish it's just like a little voice chattering away to you and when i say everything i'm talking when you're on the train the all the announcements unless it's the driver occasionally chips in much like over here now where it'll say the next stop is blah blah blah it does that on the buses in london it does it on the trains everything i was used to that but it's it keeps going it's like giving you some announcements and something else it's going off like two minutes when we got on the train blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All this natural in a way.

I was like, geez, I wonder what it's saying.

The lift will talk to you.

The toilet will talk to you.

The bathtub will talk to you.

Everything is talking to you.

And it's all just constant, which is kind of bizarre.

And let me guess, you never answered back.

I know.

I tried.

I was like, I was like, hello, hello, toilet.

And it would chat to me.

Hello, Lynn.

Because

this one in one of the places we stayed in, as soon as you went in, it motion detected you.

And the lid opened, it played a song and it talked to you.

So in the end, we we were like, hell, good morning, toilet, and like chatting to it, became like a member of the family.

Yeah.

But yeah, it was like, it's like, yeah, it is, it is like that.

You walk down the street and, you know, we sometimes see it here that there's some advert or something playing, but it is more than that.

It's like, you know, every, you know, there'll be,

I guess, this is one of the things I noticed was that there'll be a railway station and they'll have their own sort of identity and their own music when you arrive.

When the train pulls in, it plays a a tune exactly and it's like

and you're like oh we're at you know or whatever like it's got its own tune uh for each station um but yeah all a lot of chatter and a lot of noise um but the japanese people themselves are very quiet yeah so it's like they filled this silence with the electronic voices um yeah maybe

outside the pachinko parlours yeah it's just deadly quiet yeah um but outside like the pachinko parlours there's these little mascot things there's loads of mascots everything seems to have a mascot every shop has some kind of face that is like a little kawaii face or something funny or like bizarre or whatever um so there was this pachinko parlor near one of the places we stayed and it was like a ball with clapping hands for on the top of its head where its hair would be and it clapped its hands and it shouted at you in japanese to come into the pachinko parlor but we didn't go in because i was like there's a lot of middle-aged lads in there they're not going to have they're going to have no truck with foreigners mucking up the system sitting at the wrong machine or doing it wrong so i thought i don't want to step on their toes they queued up all my

money just like they take everyone else in the archive flex but there was a big queue for all of these places they're allowed those places eh the pachinko yeah it's insane i don't know how anybody even

they're doing when they're in there it's yeah i don't know

whatever it's like it's like this asmr nightclub of noise and balls and spinning

balls god there's a lot of balls it's

it is a lot but at the same time it's like it's not, right?

It's both serene and over the top crazy, you know?

It's both, which is a hard thing to square, right?

A lot of time.

But as a tourist, I mean, you are seeing an unusual...

atypical version right of the place because you're trying to go to a different place every day did you see did you have like um a railway station bento or did you like have any like did you experience the railway stations?

Because railway stations are kind of like more like hubs for shops and restaurants.

Yes, I would say like every single, first of all, the stations are enormous.

Like I always think of Waterloo as being a big station.

It is nothing compared to these stations.

Like the central station in Kyoto was vast, absolutely vast.

I swear to God, you'd go in it and you'd be walking.

We would be keeping track of how far we were walking each day.

And walking from the entrance point that we took to the station in Kyoto to the other side to get the Shinkansen is a mile walk.

No word of a lie.

It is a one mile walk.

And I could not believe it.

And that's, you know, with all the twisting and turning and up this stairs and down these stairs, it all adds up to about a mile.

And so just going somewhere for the day felt like quite a lot of walking just to get going.

And every station was teeming with shops and cafes and restaurants and gacha machines and pachinko parlors and some kind of clothing store.

It's like every station, all the big stations anyway, because there are a lot of little smaller stations that you wouldn't say that about, but I don't think there's any comparable station in the UK to any of the bigger stations in Japan.

They're just so big, it's mind-boggling.

But yeah, so there's like, you go to one of these stations and it's not just one level.

It'll be like six floors with escalators and lifts and malls and everything.

It's crazy big.

And of course, Tokyo itself has a population, greater metropolitan area of something like 45 million people.

Yeah, it's insane.

I think every shop is a little bit different.

It is the biggest city now.

I'm pretty sure.

It's got to be close because in terms of population.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, we went up the Sky Tree, which is like this, I think it's the third tallest structure in the world.

It's like the huge tower.

And we went up there and you can look in every direction and it's just city to the horizon.

And it's just, it's not like little city.

It's all blocks and apartment blocks and like multi-level blocks and huge malls and huge offices um i think it would take a lifetime to get to know tokyo because it's so big so going there for a week was just felt silly really by the way is so tall oh my god everywhere around you looks like a 2d plane right yeah like you you can't when you're up at the top of the sky tree you're like oh there's no building that is even half as high not even remotely close yeah no oh like you are literally towering you you may as well be in in an airplane flying over Tokyo.

That is how that's high, it feels it is crazy, bizarre.

Um, but yeah, and sways, you can see it swaying a little bit because it's so tall, uh, which takes some getting used to.

But I'm glad you experienced these same things I did, yeah, because it's nice that we can say, Wasn't it insane?

Because you try to describe it, and people are like, Oh, when you've been there, you're like, that sounds insane, and you're right, it is insane because I've seen it.

It's just, I mean, but the mall underneath the sky tree was like six floors and had every shop you could imagine.

All these restaurants, all these food courts, and it just went on and on and on.

And it was, it was a lot.

There was also when Niros, there was something I saw.

This was advertising itself as Conversation House.

And

it was just a doorway down an alleyway.

And I immediately thought, oh, hello.

But it says here, I translated it into English: meeting someone you don't know.

This house where you can enjoy conversation with others is called Hitonoma.

Bring your own food and drinks.

You can come empty-handed, and ice is free.

One person, one hour, 1,200 yen, which is like six quid.

New solo travelers and singles, welcome.

No groups.

Open from 6 p.m.

Closed, depends on mood.

Please be aware that there is a cat in the house.

That is the weirder side of Japan that you see, where there's just something advertising itself as a conversation house.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

But I'm like, is that?

But again, this as a cultural visitor, if I'm in Soho, you can tell immediately which places are the brothels and the dodgy massage parlours.

I don't know if this is a genuine thing or if I go up there and someone just strips off making as soon as they get up, like, what is happening?

Or, yeah, I mean, maybe that is, maybe the true description of that should be a kidney theft house.

Would you like to bring your old

conscious and wake up

or you can put the organs on ice?

Yeah, this is my sky in this ice bath.

Why do I miss ice bath?

Yeah,

but it could just be a nice little

house with a cat

where you get to meet meet someone who's at worst going to try and convert you to their religion or whatever.

Right, exactly.

And you guys went for longer than a week, but I mean a week.

A week's good though.

You can still get a lot of time.

So we were there for two weeks.

Oh, but we were in Kyoto for a week.

Right.

Okay.

So we did a few days in Tokyo, then we went to Kyoto, then we came back to Tokyo.

So we stayed in three places.

Right.

And I will say the accommodation was all flat.

It was very clean and, you know, all the rest of it.

But there was nowhere to sit.

And I realize that there's a big thing with sitting on the floor in Japan.

I get that.

I'm old and European.

I need a sofa.

They do not do sofas in the places we got.

So the first place, there was no telly, no sofa, which was bizarre.

The second place, no sofa.

It was a beautiful house, but the telly was like in the dining area.

So we had to sit on dining chairs.

That was kind of uncomfortable.

You want to hang out in the evening with your family.

You're all sitting at the dining table, a little uncomfortable.

The third place apparently slept eight people.

It can fuck off.

You barely slept four people in there comfortably.

If you double the number of people in this place, people would have been killing each other.

It would have been like on one of the sort of old ships, wooden ships.

But it was crazy.

And again, nowhere to sit.

It was weird, but they cram everything in because space is so tight.

You've got all those people in this city, and they're all going vertically and like small, small, small.

So all the gadgets and everything is about stacking things and using vertical space.

It looks all like those old pod hotels and stuff, too.

Like they are, they are very limited on space oh yeah a hundred percent hundred percent um it's kind of frantic though like there i mean going out for the day you you because you're jet lagged you sort of wake up early um you know you head out you do some stuff and and some days i after after a week or so there i was like oh i might just not leave the you know the hotel today yeah um we had some days where we were like let's not do anything today let's just relax but yeah we then we'd be like actually let's go to the well we'll go to the cinema or we'll go to a shop or something.

And every time we did just venture out, we'd find some area where we wanted to explore much more, but we just didn't have the time.

Like it honestly felt like you could easily spend, if I went back, I would go for longer, like maybe a month in just Tokyo

because I'd want to, you know, and with other people, with friends and go and do stuff and in spring, not in summer.

Because I don't mind if it rains.

I don't care about rain.

I care about blistering heat.

But one of the other things we really liked was the vending machines you were talking talking about, they are everywhere.

So we're walking around in this boiling heat and you're just buying, constantly buying drinks from these vending machines.

And we got all these brands that we really liked.

Like, oh, they've got the peach drink that we love.

So we, you know, and again, it was like 50p, 60p.

So you're just churning through all of these, these bottles, but it's just the amount of plastic waste made me feel really bad.

I know they burn a lot of stuff because Japan doesn't have the land for

the land to garbage production is way off, right?

They have to incinerate it.

so they have they literally burn all their garbage.

And you know that these plastic bottles they probably ain't getting recycled.

Maybe they are, I'd like to think they are, but the plastic waste, so much stuff is in plastic that by the end of it, we're like, God, how much plastic did we generate this holiday alone?

It was kind of crazy.

Yeah, I guess they just like, if they, if they find a whale, they just stick the plastic bottles into their blowhole.

Yeah, they're pretty busy.

But the 7-Eleven

7-Eleven and Lawson's and Family Mart are the big three.

Didn't see as many Family Marts.

I don't think I've ever been to a convenience store that is as convenient and as fantastic as the 7-Eleven and the Lawson is.

And when we were out and about, we would regularly just stop in one and grab something to eat, get an onigiri or get some, which is like those little rice triangles.

We'd get like karagi, which is just fried chicken.

You can get like teriyaki skewers, and it's just there at the front of the shop.

You just help yourself, and it's cheap as chips, and it's really delicious.

And all there's usually a

the stuff in there as well, which you need to yeah, exactly.

Get the cash.

I found that the weird thing for me was that there is pornography everywhere in these stores, and it'll be like it's right there next to the ice cream, or oh, it's over there next to the gatcha machines, or there's pornography tucked in next to the biscuits.

And so these magazines with these hot Japanese girls in, and these magazines aren't like on a high shelf, they're just right there.

So I guess it's just seen as like no big deal over there, but it was kind of startling to see that.

Well, there was one funny thing that we were waking up so early.

And the first place we stayed in, which was in Taito City, which is a part of Tokyo,

we couldn't,

there wasn't a coffee machine in the house, and we just would go to get it from the 7-Eleven.

And because they're 24-hour, we got to sort of go there at like six in the morning.

And there's this sleepy young lad behind there who's been working all night.

And working the machines is simple once you know how, but when you're faced with it, you don't really know what it does.

And I'm trying to Google translate the buttons on the front to figure it out.

And I'm like, how do I pay?

So I start speaking Japanese to the guy behind the counter from my phone.

I'm like trying to say, excuse me, I would like two coffees and two iced coffees, please.

And as soon as I started speaking Japanese,

his eyes went wide and he ran around and like stopped me and did the coffee for me rather than let me butcher his language any further.

I felt so bad for this guy.

He was like, oh, and ran around.

Please stop speaking Japanese.

So that's how I felt.

But I also think, you know, he was also probably just trying to be really helpful.

Um, but uh, yeah, he, that, that was funny.

Um, and coffee, speaking of coffee, did you go to Komeda Coffee?

Did I go to Kumeda?

Kumeda Coffee, K-O-M-E-D-A.

The logo is like, it looks like a sort of guy with a big hat.

It's meant to be a medieval or a rich guy, apparently.

It's a coffee drinker.

So

I have one a day.

I didn't have coffee there.

But the Komeda Coffee is like a chain of cafes, which are amazing.

Amazing.

All the, I mean, value for money.

Forget about it.

It's such good value for money.

But the food in there, they do these egg mayonnaise and ham sandwiches with lettuce on this cloud bread, I think they call it cloud bread.

Which Japanese bread is like the Japanese bread, you can barely feel it.

It's so light.

It's like it doesn't get in the way of eating the sandwiches.

That'd be so if you just took the egg, the mayonnaise, and the ham out of that, bad boy.

Just a lettuce sandwich.

But it honestly, it was.

If you go to Japan, go to Komato Coffee.

I think there should absolutely be one over here.

They're that good.

And there's a little doorbell that you ring for service.

They do like shaved ice in there.

Like the menu is bizarre.

It's kind of all over the place.

We got our own coffee places over here that are

just as good, if not better.

Yeah, Costa Coffee and Cafe Nero and trying to think of Starbucks.

Starbucks.

Starbucks.

Yeah.

And we got some other ones too, I'm sure.

But it's, it, you, when you, when you go to a different place, not even just Japan, like when you go anywhere and

you get something that they probably take for granted the same way we take a lot of stuff for granted, but it's so much better than what you have at home.

You always get home and you just feel like shit.

You're like, oh.

Yeah, that was the thing coming home, and I was thinking, if I try to go out to a cafe and get something to eat and a coffee or whatever, it's not going to be anywhere near as good.

It's going to be twice the price at least.

And someone's going to like slap it down on the counter for me.

And they're not going to bow and say,

and hand me a receipt.

No, no, they're just going to sort of huff at you.

And then you're just going to,

you know, you're just going to think about like Nigel Farage or like maybe like David Cameron or something.

You'll just get like a vision of them and you're, you know, it makes your coffee like taste worse.

Like even

more bitter and stuff.

And it's just like, fuck, get me out of this fucking stinking hellhole.

I want to

just joking.

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I'm with the show.

So

I've made some notes.

I realize I've been talking a lot, but I figured.

No, no, it's interesting.

I'm only talking.

I mean,

the last time I went to Japan was, I think I went in, well, the first and only time I went was like 20 years ago.

So I think some of the stuff that you and Lewis have done is like, wasn't there when I was there sort of thing.

But there would would have been like similar things.

Like, did

like, did you enjoy going to Shibuya for the first time and seeing the big crossing and stuff?

What's Shibuya?

I thought that was kind of the, that was kind of cool.

The big shopping district in

Tokyo, and it's got like that, it was like

12-crossing.

I think that's a perfect example, though, of period spending a week in Tokyo and not knowing what Shibuya is.

It's like one of the most famous

crossings.

You get off the train, you're at the train station, and you get a a really good view of it.

There's like a skywalk that connects like two stations together.

I don't know, it's kind of hard to explain.

There's like there, but there's like all these crosswalks, and they all activate at the same time.

So, like, right, there's like a big X that goes through like the middle of the traffic, but then on the

peripheries, there's like seven or eight other little crosswalks, but it all activates at the same time.

So, it's just this

tidal wave of humans all converging into the road at once, like on the regular.

So, me and my eldest, when we went to that part of Tokyo, we found this German beer hall because Mrs.

F had worked in that area, quite near Shibuya, I think.

She'd worked there for a couple of weeks with her job.

She'd had to go over there earlier this year.

So, she'd like scouted out a lot of Tokyo and was like, We've got to see this, we've got to see that.

Um, but it was quite a long day, and it was a lot of shopping.

And my eldest is a lot like me in that, after a while, being around that many people and that much noise, we're just like, I have to go somewhere quiet, please.

This is too much.

So,

and I'd say, you know, my eldest is even more like that.

Um, so I went home with him, and we were like, We'll just go back and chill.

Um, and my youngest and uh, Mrs.

F went to Shibuya and did all the shops and all the rest of it.

Um, so they may well have seen it.

I'm sorry I missed it, but we did see no

sort of the very fancy area where there's all the big shops, like I think

Suki Tiger trainers

that a lot of people like will have an idea of what like their quintessential is, but it's not the same same as the next person's, you know, like yeah, sure.

It's it is just that kind of place, you know, like

100%.

But yeah, I mean, like, I don't think, I don't think the, was it, did you call it the sky tree, the, the, the, really tall?

I'm not sure that that was even there when we went, because we, that's something that we would have.

I don't think it was, no, that's something that we would have sought out for sure.

But we did go up a big tower in a place called Ropongi Hills, which is like

quite a tall.

We saw them everywhere.

Quite a tall tower, but we went up at night, which was really interesting.

So we got to see this.

We did that in Kyoto.

But the tower, this was after the Tokyo Sky Tree.

So we went up this other tower and it felt like shit.

Even though it wasn't, it was fine.

But it just felt like, by comparison, like, no, we're barely even in the clouds here.

You know, it's kind of like

we went to another, it was a big government building, but it looked mad.

It was like, it looked like something out in North Korea or something.

It was like shaped like an H, I think, or something.

Or like it was like

a horseshoe shape.

but it was it was massive it's this massive massive building but you could just go into it and go to the top and and have a look and that was that was pretty interesting too i can't remember what it's called they have those gates all i can't remember what they're called someone will know it's like a red gate that is shaped like that like a like an n sort of like uh yeah not not not an uppercase n but just imagine like a yes like a you know what i mean it's like a flat i don't know how to describe it a square with one side is the ground yeah that's the best way i could describe it And they're everywhere.

I think there's some, I think they're either Buddhist or Shitto.

So the government building might have been designed.

But yeah.

So I made some notes of things that would, these, some of these are just two words

that as I went along, I just made notes of just things that happened that I thought were funny.

Someone might need to remember, or some I might need to explain.

So first of all, one of them is just, it's just two words, ice hat.

Ice hat.

Ice hat.

And I remember now what that was is that it was so hot that I was wearing a baseball cap to keep the sun off the dome.

And I would run the hat under the tap to soak it and then put it in the freezer overnight.

And before we left the house, the last thing I put on my ice hat to get me a bit of coldness between our house and the station because it would melt gradually in the heat and the sun and the cold water would run down me and keep me cold and then evaporate so quickly in the heat that by the time I got there, the ice hat was bone dry.

But all the sweat.

Insane.

It's not insane.

It was fabulous.

You had three weeks necessary.

Yeah, I had to wash.

This summer has been so hot.

I had to wash my hat the other day.

I went to go put it on, and because I've been sweating in my hat so much, it stopped.

Salt.

It really was.

I had salt.

Salt deposits.

So you could see like the white salt deposits burned into the hat.

So I had to wash it.

Yeah, yeah.

And then I was like, fuck it, I'll put it in the freezer.

I'll wear it fresh.

It was amazing.

I think I might have been very smart.

Mine smells really nice now, but I tell you what, this hat was not smelling good.

It's bad.

So, all right, here's the next one: disney versus any japanese characters we'd go into these toy shops and there would be all these genuinely incredible really funny really beautiful or really kawaii characters and all this merch you could buy and then alongside them disney has shoehorned in some of their toot that just looks like shit like when you see mickey mouse and woody and buzz lightyear next to this sort of array of fantastic japanese characters disney looks like wank he looks so bad Like I was really just stunned at how sort of glaringly bad it looked compared to the Japanese equivalent.

And I just could not believe how shit it looked.

It just looked really boring and really sort of like, it lacked character.

Like we bought all these stickers, they're quite big stickers.

We bought one of Mount Fuji and it makes me laugh every time I look at it.

It really does.

I can't describe it.

You have to see it.

But it's just, I felt like the Disney stuff just looked so out of place and crap.

I was kind of shocked and it made me realize that this

prestige brand just to me didn't didn't look good at all by comparison to the Japanese stuff.

That was kind of weird.

I really did go quite kawaii over there.

I bought a lot of crap.

I have a lot of dangly stuff.

I've got this green lad.

He bought a lot of dingle dangles.

I did.

He's called Smisky.

He's a little glow-in-the-dark lad.

He's attached to my phone and

he glows in the dark quite a lot when you charge him up.

And he's sort of sitting with his legs sort of up a little bit and his hands on his knees.

And he just looks really depressed.

I was like, that guy's perfect.

And in one of the gacha machines, like, we got a bunch of Sylvanian family stickers.

So I got one of those on the back of my phone.

My bag has this egg.

There's this character.

Why did you get Sylvanian family stickers, of all things?

Mate, Dudatama.

It's

it, the egg.

So I've got one of them.

The Sylvanian family, I think, is Japanese.

It was everywhere, dude.

Everywhere.

It doesn't sound very Japanese to to me the Sylvanian family

or something.

No,

the Sylvanian family, though, right?

You know them.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

With the Sylvanian family family.

Oh, hey, is that Ricky Red?

It's a fucking giraffe already.

With teddy bears over here.

We don't like no giraffes in this neighborhood.

Oh, yeah.

So here's the next thing.

There was a temple in,

I think it was in Tokyo.

It might have been Kyoto.

I can't remember.

It was like a really nice area.

I think it was Tokyo.

It was like, we went there at night.

It's a shopping area, like half the places in Tokyo seem to be.

And there's a big temple.

And in there, there's an area where you can make a donation into a box.

And then you randomly generate this number.

I can't remember how.

And it basically tells you draw something.

You draw a little, a little stub.

And it tells you open drawer H15.

And you open it.

And you take the top fortune and close the drawer.

And you read your fortune.

And it's like, that's your fortune.

And

you're generally going to get a bad fortune.

That's the way they pitch it.

They're like, a lot of them are going to be bad.

Don't buy another one.

Your fortune is your fortune.

You just have to live with it.

I was like, cool.

I realized if this was in the UK, those fortunes would be all over the fucking floor in two seconds.

People would just be tossing them about.

There'd be litter everywhere.

No one would give a shit.

This trust-based society idea where you just take one and close the drawer could not exist in anywhere but Japan.

And you're right.

It was so

stunning to me that there was no litter anywhere.

There's no bins and there's no litter.

Like there's no bins anywhere you're walking in the most busy place you've ever been there's no litter in the gutters there's no litter

no cigarette buttons no

like why but there's no bins what is the story behind somebody's underpants on the road like all the time like i always see underpants on the road for some reason like why is this why does this happen in jersey yeah well in jersey i used to used to see it in canada all the time like you know parts the uk like if you're driving on the motorway or whatever there's everywhere there there's yeah the garbage.

Here's the funny thing.

We joke about this.

We joke about because we've been playing GeoGuesser a little bit.

And there's this thing where if you put a street view man down anywhere in India, anywhere in India, I mean, I mean it.

Yeah.

There is every street is lined with litter.

And it must be cultural.

It must be cultural that they just drive along the roads and chuck any litter out of the car.

And that's

every single, and you can, you could, it's such a bizarre thing, right?

And it's so indicative.

It's such a predictor.

You're like, oh, there's litter on the side of the road.

That means we're probably

in India.

Yeah.

It's just mad to me that people would just...

And I've seen people do it too.

Just chuck something on the ground.

But they don't do it.

Like, they literally, I did not see anybody do it.

Everybody takes their litter with them.

Japan just feels so different.

Like the famous thing that when they were at the World Cup, the Japanese fans cleaned up all their litter at the end of the game and left.

There was nothing.

It was like their area of the stadium was like spotless.

And I just think that is the least that we could do is to just give a shit about your own rubbish.

And we just don't.

The thing about it, it's, I think, it's a cultural thing that comes from, and I've said this before, from being at school, because Japanese schools, apparently, don't hire cleaners.

The students have to do it at the end of every day.

And so they kind of learn this,

you know, it's their responsibility.

As soon as you, and you do this as a,

look,

when we were, when I was growing up, you know, as a teenager,

my mum and dad did the majority of the cleaning.

Right.

Right.

And I didn't do shit.

But you never have to like do the dishwasher or like clean the table, clear the dishes or anything?

Like, like a little bit, like a little bit, but I was definitely more of a slob, right?

Yeah, I make my kids do well.

Well, exactly.

And I think that, you know,

I very quickly learned that if I make a mess, I'm going to be the one to clean it up, right?

But I think a lot of people never learn that lesson.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It's interesting or anywhere in the world.

But I mean, you know, just things like the park.

There's parks around me.

People will just have a barbecue in the middle of the park with those little fucking metal trays.

I've moaned about it before on this podcast.

And they'll burn the grass and just leave everything there and fuck off.

And it's not their problem.

And I just think if you did that in Japan, people's jaws would be on on the floor.

And I don't know if they would call you out or if they would just write you off as a despicable foreigner, which would be reasonable.

Because going over there, I felt, I wrote this, this little paragraph is how I summed it up.

Being English, you might think that a nice middle-class lad like me will fit in with the whole politeness thing, but I felt like such a bore, such a borish oaf over there.

I felt so inexcusably, violently, horrifically rude because I was just nowhere near their level of respectfulness and kindness and neatness and everything.

I felt like every time I raised my voice or I laughed too loud, I was like, I'm being such a pain in the ass now.

I am the worst tourist, the worst example of a tourist, just because I'm being loud and I'm walking in the wrong place and I'm crossing at the wrong time.

They have this system.

And if you don't fit in with it, you stick out like a sore thumb.

And it really did make me feel very borish and like a terrible tourist.

But we tried our best.

I mean, we're not litterbugs anyway.

My kids fucking hate littering.

I hate it too.

Mrs.

F hates it.

If we have rubbish, we always take it with us.

But I just feel like if you took 10,000 British people and dropped them in Tokyo, they would have the worst reputation in no time for being loud and drunk and dropping litter and just being careless and gobby and all the rest of it.

And it's led to our culture, I think, being much less concerned with other people, especially post-COVID.

All the complaints I see are about people being loud on the underground, people not giving a shit, barging into each other, litter everywhere, lost all this social cohesion that we had that they have clung on to.

But does mean that they are very distrusting of foreigners and I think quite dismissive of foreigners in a way because they've got this culture that works.

And if you think about dropping someone in who's not of that culture, you don't want them fucking it up.

And you think that we would, even without meaning to, fuck it up.

So I felt quite guilty going there on holiday in a weird way.

Yeah, it's, I completely agree.

It's, yeah, it's weird.

I think there's, I mean, I don't know so much about Japan, but I think I remember reading something recently where

there is like a sense in some circles that they are sick of foreigners, sick of tourists and stuff.

Well, they've got a guy coming up now politically.

Yeah, that's

very much like

he said things like,

like, apparently this has been a Japanese nationalist thing for a while, but in World War II, you've heard about the massacre in Nanking, where they did like, they killed all these civilians.

They did all these medical experiments with them.

They had these like rooms where they took women and just the soldiers just, you know, did their, whatever they wanted with them, all this kind of stuff.

Like terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, genuine war atrocities, war crimes.

And this guy's coming up saying, ah, it's a myth, didn't happen.

Or they deserved it.

They're animals.

And he's like a mainstream politician in Japan, from what I can understand.

Right.

And he's very anti-foreigner and very much like Japan is the best.

Our culture is the best.

Japanese people are better than these foreigners who are here.

It's like that.

So that's we have this all over the world.

We do.

We have this in, we have fascism and authoritarianism

in charge in America.

We have it almost being in charge in Germany and France.

And quite frankly, you know, it's and the Netherlands have got that guy.

Quite frankly, here, you know, people are...

There's a good chance in four years' time or however long we're going to have Nigel fucking Farage in charge.

I was saying the other day, 100%, if I put money on it now, that that reform wins the next election.

Like, if we have the election now, they would be.

We actually have to actively fight this because, unfortunately, there's a lot of people who

look, Japan is very welcoming, and a lot of people are very good and nice, and most of it is fine.

But I think that you see it too in places like

holiday destinations where people are like, oh, I'm sick of the tourism.

I'm sick of

Barcelona.

Protesting about all of the Spain is all about anti-tourism.

as well yeah because it's just it's it's absolutely ruining the the local economy for everybody right like it's all it is but

without the tourism Spain is fucked yeah like they they have youth unemployment is terrible over there and there's a lot of low-level racism that's what it is really it's it's like immigration it's low-level racism of like of of of people

blaming and politicians easily blaming they're like oh you the reason that your life is hard is because someone foreign has come along and stolen it.

You know, that is their

answer.

It's a weird issue to begin with because I feel like it's like

it's that age-old, you know, we created a problem that

we're going to fix now.

Like you, you, you wouldn't have

the level of immigration that

we have in the first place had it not been for this requirement for cheap labor all the time throughout history.

You know, like if you never had that, it wouldn't have been an attractive prospect in the first place to come over, right?

Like it would have just been,

it wouldn't be the big problem that it is now, but they've kind of created it.

And now they're like, oh, now we're going to solve it.

But it's like, it's so stupid.

Like you created all of this in the first place through the money that you take from people.

Freezing wages at like

the private sector just run rampant, basically.

Well, here's the thing that I think is really funny with AI, right?

So people, one of the common things about AI is like, oh, I can't wait for the, this is what people thought 20 years ago.

I can't wait for the AI to come along and it can help me.

do my washing for me and you know carry my shopping home and do I know do all the things and the AI is like no no I don't want to do that I want to do the art I want to do the music

all the stuff that might bring you joy

with the drudgery I don't want you to just yeah exactly.

I wanted to do all that fun create stuff.

It's like, oh, no, no, no, that's that's we can handle that.

And it's the same thing with, with to some extent, um, you know, not wanting to do physical things.

I think, you know, it certainly has been seen to be the job of the lower classes or whatever to do manual labor or, you know,

I don't know, nursing or things like this, things that are actually like more,

we need more and more people doing, you know, these, these these jobs um and we are unwilling to do them because we see them as below us right in some in some way um and it's it's it's led to

just a cultural evolution of families saying we want the best for our children and the best for our children is not for them to be employed as a cleaner for them to be employed as a you know a bin man um you know it's it's seen as like too

much if these jobs actually just fall pay children's living wage,

I think a lot of people would just be like, you know what?

It's not the best job, but at least I can do the things I need.

Precisely.

I can put food on the table, I can pay my rent, and I can have some money left over to take my family on a vacation or whatever.

It's the opposite, right?

It's completely.

It's bizarre that the worst jobs are the ones that pay the least.

It's backwards, right?

And

it's largely due to a exploitation of of immigrants, right?

It's like on the one hand, we're blaming them for, you know, we, modern society blames, you know,

immigrants for taking all the jobs.

But at the same time, we are so unwilling to pay for those jobs that the only people willing to take them are the people who are desperate.

And that is

exploitation in its purest form.

You know, society is not very smart with this thing.

And it's a shame, really, that politically,

the socialist governments in the world don't recognize that.

But who am I to

complain?

Hey, let me tell you about Mount Fuji.

We went to see Mount Fuji.

It was a day trip.

It was about two and a half hour drive outside Tokyo to the, I think, to the west.

And

we went to the temple area.

We went across a lake on this big boat, which was stunning.

Brought a tear to my eye.

Went up a mountain on a cable car to a sulfur mine.

So you went up Mount

Mount Fuji.

Did you go down to the source of the core source of the mine and find my ass down there?

Dude, it smells so bad.

I'd not smelled sulfur that much before.

It is fucking, it smells like rotten eggs.

It just stinks of rotten eggs.

I used to go to a

butt.

I used to go to a summer camp.

Well, I went one year, I went to a summer camp when I was younger in a place called Cumberland, not in the in the UK.

Cumberland is Cumberland, Ontario.

And there, for whatever reason, I don't know why, there's like some sulfur or I don't know what the what the water system was or whatever, but all of their public drinking water out of fountains or whatever near this place that I was at, stunk of eggs like fucking everywhere.

Like, I don't know, it's so weird.

I don't know what causes it.

I'm sure somebody listening probably has been to Cumberland before

and knows, but there's certain places like that, like in

Rotorua in New Zealand, like towns that are just built around this

stinky sulfur vents.

I cannot imagine living near it.

You can drive, you're driving into it.

It was rock.

You can smell it coming.

Yeah.

And I think you get used to it pretty quickly when you're there.

Maybe.

So you were meant to be able to see Fuji from the top of this sulfur mining mountain, but sure.

You couldn't because it was, because it's a big fucking mountain, mountains sort of have their own weather system.

It was just shrouded in cloud.

Like that happens.

It was hugely, like you could see hints of it, little hints.

And then we were like, all right, let's get on the coach.

The man was shy.

He was very shy.

So we got on the coach, we went down to this place where we're going to have lunch.

And it suddenly started pissing it down.

And I said to Mrs.

F, if it rains, that cloud could just rain out because it's hit the mountain now.

It might just rain out, like just let itself out, and then we'll see it.

Lo and behold, there was Mount Fuji.

The clouds just vanished in rain, just pissed all the way.

And there was Mount Fuji.

It was beautiful.

And the next stop of this village that with these amazing views of Mount Fuji, seeing it there with that strange blue tint that it has, it wasn't winter when it has a little ice cap on top, but it was just gorgeous.

It was absolutely stunning to see.

But we were just one coach trip amongst a hundred.

So you felt like you were taking the same photo as thousands of other people have that day alone.

So it didn't feel that sort of unique, which was a shame.

And I'm sure that it feels massively over sort of subscribed.

If you're like, so many people want to go see Mount Fuji, with good reason, it is beautiful, but nothing about the experience was unique.

It was fine.

It was a fun day out.

But it was a long coach ride there and back.

And that was the thing.

On the way back, I didn't realize how bad the traffic was going to be in Tokyo.

They seem to have sorted everything else out but traffic because their traffic was fucking awful.

And Japanese lads are super aggressive drivers.

Like they are really aggressive.

They go fast and they cut people up and they're like honking their horns.

That was the least Japanese thing that I saw was their driving,

which is mad because their cars are all so cute.

They have these little things called, I think they're called key cars or K cars.

It's K-E-I.

And it's like the most Kawaii little car you've ever seen.

It's like a tiny little van with little wheels, seats four, has a boot, but there's no wasted space.

So it's like if you took a van and compressed all of the sort of air space in it down to the smallest manageable size, that would be one of these vans.

And they're all driving around at the speed of light and honking and cutting each other up.

I was like, wow, the least Japanese thing.

You get someone behind the wheel of a car, they forget who they are.

I'm telling you, even the Japanese really made me laugh.

I really want one of those little cute Japanese.

I looked into it.

You can import them, but they're expensive.

But I immediately was like, oh my God, I've got to get one of those.

So here's another detail.

Your camera, the sound of your camera taking a noise, as soon as you arrive, you get a notification that you have to have the sound on.

It's locked on in that region.

And it doesn't matter.

Like, I have Express VPN on my phone, so I put that on so that I could

get to some websites that the UK wouldn't let me watch, like Netflix and stuff, to watch stuff I downloaded on my phone.

I was like, no, that's not available in your region.

So I'd have to VPN to get to like my Mad Men series, for example.

But that still is.

Your Magnum series.

Madmen.

Oh, sorry.

I thought you were watching Magnum PI.

No,

it's still that old, right?

Yeah.

But so you take a picture and it goes,

so that you can't like all these lads were upskirting women on the trains and stuff like that um that was that was one thing smoking can't smoke anywhere can't vape anywhere in japan and apart from designated areas right and i'm saying these designated areas are not common they are like blocks and blocks of a walk to get to yeah

like outside like all over the sidewalks yeah can't smoke on the city this is something

Tom and Ben noticed when they were in Japan, and it was very much like Tom had his little glass box of shame when he had to go and have a cigarette.

That's what Mrs.

Edward She called it the cupboard of shame.

Yeah, it would be like he would, he would kind of be in a sad, like a phone booth style box with a bunch of middle-aged lads.

And these younger lads are smoking this thing that it's like a cut-down third of a cigarette that you put in a box.

It's like a smokeless cigarette or something.

I don't know how it works, but that seemed to be all the rage over there.

They all had those.

And when they saw the vape, the clouds of vape that I was producing, they sort of give me this mystified look, like, what the hell is this foreigner doing?

Which made me laugh.

um we went to pull your cannon out and and the clouds start appearing you're like a weather

you're like a weather weapon you're a weather

because they had all this smokeless shit and i'm like

big fat clouds and they're like oh fucking foreigners um we went to nara which is this temple with deer um yeah awful worst trip uh my youngest had these visions of feeding the deer by hand and petting them and having this idyllic situation like disney princess style we bought these biscuits to feed the deer we were attacked immediately.

And I mean, it's the pitching thing on African.

But they were goring me with their horns.

They were barging me, kicking me, biting me.

We both got bitten.

They bite you on the ass.

And not like lightly.

I mean, like someone has got a stapler and stapled your ass.

That's how much it hurts.

Whoa.

So I turned around and just threw the biscuits at this pack of deer.

And they were like,

ravenous.

And my youngest is running away from this deer.

And I was like, just throw the biscuits.

Throw the biscuits.

And my eldest is just filming her and laughing her head off.

It was rotten.

And she was like, I fucking hate Nara.

This place sucks.

I was like, yeah, I know, love.

So that was bad.

But the funny thing was, is here's one of the reviews we read for Nara.

This is by Kika T.

This is her review.

She posted three photos as well.

I went with my family.

We bought tickets for everyone and had a stroller.

So when we were trying to get in through the slope area, one of our tickets was suddenly eaten by a deer that appeared right there, right in front of the staff.

And so we were refused entry.

They told us to buy new tickets immediately.

They spoke in a a cold tone with no sympathy whatsoever.

We were all frozen in shock at this unexpected response, saying, huh?

And the mood became awful.

It was terrible.

I didn't feel any mercy from them.

I don't want to even give it one star, which is a great review.

That was originally in Japanese.

That is a great review.

I mean, it's damning as well.

A real damning review.

Yeah.

They were mortified by the etiquette approach or whatever.

How fascinating.

Look, we're we're gonna have to pick this up next time okay i've still got plenty to talk can i just quickly quickly tell you something uh that i did uh yesterday i went to see some puppies you get a dog no i'm not getting a dog no i my our our friends just got two uh jack russell puppies a brother and a sister uh combo and man they're so cute but i'm not getting dogs did this i won't get it did this lighten up your life did it raise your spirits no it's just i i you know i don't mind puppies i think they're i think they're pretty good so um so i went to see them and i'm gonna go see them again they remind you of when your babies were young and cute oh not really no just just just puppies they were just peeing everywhere and pooing but it's funny to see them play man they go crazy they're like they sound like uh hyenas sometimes too they're like

biting each other and stuff it was really good it was fun they were really cute they're they're small yeah i think they're like maybe like a month or two months old so they're they're really really little so they play

they were playing for like 10-15 minutes.

We were getting them all whipped up and everything, and then they just fell asleep.

Yeah, so they'll just go like,

yeah, and then they woke up and had some food and stuff.

It was good, it was really fun.

We're gonna see, I'm happy to come over and play with Terry at some point, but we'll see.

Oh, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, God, sure.

Terry ain't go like that.

It's like a grandpa with two toddlers running around.

You should see Terry go.

Like, we just let him out in the backyard now.

Every day is like some voyage of discovery.

He's just like, he's out.

He's like looking around and like he's trying to like bury himself like in all these new places and stuff.

Oh, it's amazing.

He's just living his

best life, yeah.

Till he goes back in the fridge.

Oh, I'm so glad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To get his ass back in the fridge.

Well,

he's English.

You know, he's making use of the two months.

Yeah, the two months of nice weather.

Nice weather.

That's it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's but it's nearly over now.

Yeah.

Man, they're, they are, they are so cute, though, puppies, but I wouldn't have any.

Oh, I say, they're just too much work, especially.

Oh, my God.

We left Aggie with my mom for two weeks while we went away.

And my mum fell in love with her.

She's known Aggie for years, of course, whenever she comes up to stay.

But to have her stay in there, she was like, I wish I could do this.

But I also realized that it would be a lot.

Like, you can't just pop out and leave her sometimes.

You know, you think, like, oh, no, I don't want to go out all day because I can't leave the dog alone going on holiday.

You've got to figure that out.

Yeah.

But I wouldn't change it for the world.

We love having her.

And it's, I think it's nice for kids to have a pet.

Yeah.

It's that they have to work around because it kind of teaches you to think about someone, quite frankly, less capable than you.

Because Aggie's fucking useless a lot of the time.

So it's a good lesson for the kids to sort of say, hey, you can't leave that there.

You got to think about the dog.

You got to think about this.

Yeah.

It's good.

Well, me, like, just me and my wife went to see them just to sort of like test the waters a bit.

But like, we're going to take my kids to see them like over the weekend.

Just because like my wife's never really been around around puppies before.

Like she's been around dogs, but like it's it's funny.

It's it's quite rare to be around puppies, isn't it?

Like you could probably go whole life and not be around like a little puppy.

Like they are kind of like really new.

Yeah, you don't see them out and about.

Yeah, so she wasn't like too sure like how they were going to be and stuff.

And she thought that maybe they like, and like they do bite a little bit, but it does it doesn't hurt.

Like they're playing

their teeth are like tiny.

Yeah, yeah, they don't know what they're doing.

And I think they play with you if you're playing with them, but like they can sense from you if you're not playing with them that you know they're they're not going to really bite you and stuff even even when they're really small like they're quite quite smart really yeah um so yeah it's good so yeah no i i know what you mean though i think it's good for kids to be around animals and know how to yeah how to treat them and stuff like like our kids are around like the tortoise and guinea pigs and stuff but that they're different animals you know like guinea pigs like you can you can get them out and cuddle them and stuff but they're they are just like deathly afraid of everything that moves in the world sort of thing.

So

it's a bit more difficult, you know.

Dogs give like a bit back.

Yeah.

Funnily enough, the tortoise does as well, in the weirdest way.

Like you wouldn't think he'd have a personality, but he does.

And you can see that.

Well, I tell you what, moving things in the world, there was a cockroach in one of the houses we stayed in.

I didn't know those fuckers could fly, dude.

I had no idea.

I didn't see cockroaches ever.

This thing was huge.

It was huge.

Like its body was the size of my whole thumb.

I know.

And it had antennas the size of like pool cues.

And it flew at my head.

Oh, and I was screamed like a baby.

Yeah.

And then I had to catch it in glass.

It was so fucking big.

Oh, my God.

But we've got way more to go through from Japan.

We're going to have to do part two.

We'll do part two.

But thank you, everyone.

And until next time.

Thanks for listening.

See you then.

See you.

Oh my god.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.