Triforce! - Flax's Japan Diaries | Triforce #330

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Triforce! Episode 330! Pyrion is back from his grand Japanese journey with a jam-packed diary of his discoveries! Go to http://expressvpn.com/triforce today and get an extra 3 months free on a 1-year package! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Start your day with freshly cracked scrambled eggs loaded on a buttery, flaky croissant. Try it with maple brown butter today at Sims At participating restaurants in Canada for limited time Hello everyone Welcome back Hi mate to the TriForce podcast Oh hi mate Konichiwa friends

Yeah he's back He's back Perian is Japanese now He's turned full Japanese He's been away This is what happens when you go. You know, what's happened to us? Yeah.

We became weeps by proxy. You do. So I haven't become a weeb. I still hate anime. That to me, I've sort of, indeed. I've sort of written an essay about my time in Japan. It's not an essay essay. It's more like a memoir, like a Portillo style.

Exactly, exactly. Very much like a Portillo style memoir. Perian's Japanese memoir. I called it Flax Japan Trip Diary for TriForce. Real catchy name. That's good. Yeah. That's, yeah.

Is there an acronym for that? Fugtaduf. Fjtif. Fudderdifter, because there's a feed on the end. Fushtadifter. Nice. Fugter difter. Before I went away, Lewis, he said to me,

please keep a diary of stuff. You got it. 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? Exactly.

But so, yeah, I made a bunch of notes. Shall I just go in and you guys interrupt whenever? Yeah, yeah. Don't worry. I will be. Honestly, this is what we've been waiting for. Okay. You 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 should, I kept you guys waiting. On tent to hooks. Well, I was there for two weeks. I got back on Sunday.

It was a bloody long track. It was a good 24 hours of travel time. Yes. 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 got away. 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 the baggage, getting on the train to fucking Tokyo. 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's so little happens. It doesn't form any lasting memory. No. Well, also, you watch a TV show normally. Exactly. You're watching something, right? you're watching an entire season of the expanse or whatever. Right.

I chose Mad Men, which I hadn't really watched much of. I watched a bit of it, but I didn't, at the time, I sort of was watching another stuff. It is good. It's a solid one. It is a solid one. 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 years ago with a friend of us, 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 that I know you mean. And at times I was asking myself, like, what are we doing in the UK? Because they 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. Yeah. amazing. They're fast, they're clean, they're on time. The connections are crazy. You can get like anywhere between cities and towers 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

are trains are compared to Japan. They are not that cheap. The Shinkansen is quite expensive, 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. Yeah, I know. But I guess they've just gone with planes instead, but it's such a shame because if you think about the way 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've got to sort of places like the Rocky Mountains, which I'm sure would be a fucking nightmare to have to tunnel through and you wouldn't be

able to 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. 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, like, Blade Runner-style neon everywhere and 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 it was a bit of a fath

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 arcane and complicated and the tickets machines themselves. It's probably just something you get used to

when you live and you use it all the time you know like for somebody 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 it's pretty pretty rough yeah you just tap it's pretty simple but it's simple because we we're because we're like a bit more sort of able to to to use these systems and stuff i know for fact that like my my my mother-in-law, for example, would be hopeless 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. So should we balance our transportation and electronics around whether some old boomer can work it out? Probably not. Well, there's a lot of them. I don't know. There are. And, I mean, they do, they do travel or try to at least.

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 a... You have got a point in that it is nice, like, in certain places to just be able to use your debit card to go beep or, you know, and then you are on, you are through and then... Yeah, and you get charged according to the way you beat out and everything, yeah. I mean, so there is something... Do you know what it would be really good?

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 are. 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 day pass. It does that. It does that in the tube. Like that's literally what it does. On the London underground. Yeah. Like, you literally don't even have to pay when you get off. You just, you just beat your card like contactless when you get on. When like when you go out the barrier, you beep in, beep out. You beep in, 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 that's what I'm saying. It could be spelled 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 buy tickets. Yeah, you would need to buy tickets for them anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, so you might find, Peryan, that your JR Rail Pass that's designed for tourists to make it cheaper, whatever, and use free Shinkansen and stuff is overpriced for what you need, depending on your trip. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I think that, like, you know, it is, I think you can probably work it out. The Shinkansen isn't the cheapest thing, you know, 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? Oh, of course not.

No, I mean, absolutely. And, 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. It's 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 with someone's seat. They would never do that. To the letter sort of thing. Yeah. They're like, no, no, no, just in case.

Because it would be mortifying for them, I guess, to have to be sat in the wrong seat. But also, the guards, when they get on, there seems 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 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. I would be so honored to be bowed to, like,

oh, dude. 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, shit, I forgot to bow. Like, wow, blah, that was just having a bow. It was crazy.

Yeah. A bowing competition. Yeah. So the other thing I found that was old-fashioned. Oh, that's so funny. Was money. The cash money. Yeah, well, and the presentation of,

of the money too. They do the bowing. With the two-handed little bowing. Yeah, they like sort of really respectfully take it from you and hand it back to you and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it all felt a little bit old-fashioned. I quite liked it. And when they give you the receipt and they're like, and I got to go zaymas, they hand you the receipt and you have to take you with both hands. And I'm like, I got to go so much for this receipt that I'm going to put in the bin. But the coinage, the paper money, it is quite funny to have like a 50,000

note on you and buy a coffee with a 10k note or whatever. But a lot of the 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 is spits out. It's 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 I think the thousand yen note is like, 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 fiver. We'll buy you those pair of shoes or whatever. 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, the gacha machines? It's like the little balls that you, for anyone doesn't know, it's like a gumball machine, but instead you get a little, you get them over here. I mean, they're popular over a year now. You get loads of them over here. But they have, like, rooms full of them. Oh, no, not in comparison.

Yeah. Yeah. You can get them. And then the whole idea about them has seeped into toys generally as well. Oh, absolutely. Most toy you go. You don't even know what you're getting. It's just.

Yeah. Like those LOL does we talked about. It's all Gatcha. Yeah. But it's like 130, 140 yen, which is like 60p. So you've got all this change. And we were just buying Gatchez 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 gatchez, little toys and things. There was one, this is so bizarre, tucked in amongst all this very kawai Japanese characters and collectibles and stuff, there's one which is pin badges of Billy Joel album covers. Why not? Like, that's a gacha. Why not? I know. And why?

And there was one that was, it was sushi, but it was Beatles sushi. So it was the famous Abby Road album cover, but with the five, with the five, with the four Beatles as sushi and then at Yoko Onish 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 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's so lucky I want all five like I really want to imagine you're Ringo and yet somebody's making like merchandise about you and stuff he's he's really lucky he's 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 guys of sushi rolls,

right? That's like, and then we need to put them in a gatcha 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? I feel like that a lot in Japan. I think you're right and I think the reason is there's so many gatchers that they're just like, fuck it, we'll just come up with something.

Like it's just all plastic tuit 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 key chains 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, what else? That is so crazy. Yeah, did you buy much stuff from vending machines? They love their vending machines. Yes. 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 this was excessive amounts of heat. Like, I've not been in that level of heat for that length of time before. 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. And I had like, like, you get these UV umbrellas and everybody has them. And we bought them because if you don't have 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, wait a minute, it's going to be outdoors. Fuck that. Like, we didn't plan around being an AC because it's just too hot. And we're staying in during midday.

Like, you know, it was really crazy. But there are 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. 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 their face. They don't want to get wet. And two could blame them. They must be melting in there.

Like I know it gets hot in the summer in Japan. Yeah, it's funny. You put 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 you're getting soaked anyway, yeah? You might as well just not have it on, just get... I mean, you'd probably be a bit cooler

with the rain. Probably. I mean, it rained like twice when we were there very small amounts. 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 ACed up. All the trains, all of the trains have AC.

I love a country that fully embraces AC. Yeah, if it's that hot. I mean, fuck, me. Yeah, it was bad. You just can't function when you're that hot. Exactly, exactly. We just kind of shut down. Yeah.

But so I will say in terms. 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 and 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. Tenor head's like about average over here now, I think, if not more, depending where you're going. Ben, well, I mean, if you're going somewhere 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 my eldest got this big, big sort of tray. It had, like, Gioza and rice, and it had a bit of soup, and had some other bits and bobs. And it was a fiver. 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 got to try out the mackeys in another country.

They had all kinds of stuff for the menu that I've never seen. You can get a beer and all the rest of it, and pretty much everywhere. Went to the cinema, you can get a beer. It was crazy. Macbiru. Yeah, McBeeru, exactly. So, everything talks to you was the thing that I was not prepared for. Yes, okay.

I'm so glad you noticed this. Okay, so I'm really just enjoying listening to your, I know this is a little bit, like, for some people, this might be like to put it 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 takes some getting used to, and it's 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, via all the announcements, unless there'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. I was used to that. But it keeps going.

It's like giving you some announcements and something else. It's given off like two minutes when we got on the train. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All this natter in a way. I was like, jeez, 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, hello, toilet. would chat to me.

Hello, live. Because this one in one of the places we stayed in, as soon as you went in, it motion detected you when the lid opened, it played a song and it talked to you. So in the end, we were like, oh, good morning, toilet. And like chatting to it, became like a member of the family. Yeah. But yeah, it was, it was bizarre. 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, I, I, I, I guess this is one of the things I know is because there'll be a railway station and they'll have their own sort of identity and their own mascot. The music when you arrive. When the train pulls in, it plays a tune.

Exactly. And it's like, didla, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And you're like, oh, we're at UNO or whatever. Like, it's got its own tune for each station. But, yeah, a lot of chatter and a lot of noise. But the Japanese people themselves are very quiet. Yeah. So it's like they filled this silence with the electronic voices.

Yeah, maybe. It's like too awkward without. Yeah, it's just deadly quiet. Yeah. But outside like the Pachinko parlors, 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 kawai face

or something funny or like bizarre or whatever. So there was this Pichinko parlor near one of the places we stayed. And it was like a ball with clapping hands 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 stuff. I don't want to step on their toes.

They queued up all morning to get in here. I think they'll take your money just like they take everyone else in your reflex. But there was a big cue for all of these places. They're allowed those places, eh? The Pachinko? It's insane. I don't know how anybody even can stimulate on what they're doing when they're in there. Yeah.

I don't think it's supposed to be, though. It's like this. A-S-M-R nightclub of noise and balls and spinning things. There's a lot of balls. God, there's a lot of balls in there. 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? I love the 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, a railway station bento, or did you, like, have any, like, did you experience the railway stations? Because the 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 keep a 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 life. 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 biggest 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 fours 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. So, I think it's the biggest city now. I'm pretty sure it's. 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, 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. 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, it's so tall. That everywhere around you looks

like a 2D plane, right? Yeah. Like, 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 as this building. Not even remotely close. No.

Like, you were literally towering, you may as well be in an airplane flying over Tokyo. That is how high it feels. It is crazy. It's bizarre. And sways. You can see it swaying a little bit

because it's so tall, which takes them getting used to. Man, 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 like, huh, but when you've been there, you're like, shit, that sounds insane. And you're right, it is insane because I've seen it.

It's just, I mean, to put the mall underneath the sky tree was like six floors and had every shop. We could imagine all these restaurants, all these food courts. And it just went on and on and on. And it was a lot. There was also, when near us, 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 translate.

it into English. Meeting someone you don't know. This house where you can enjoy conversation with others is called Hittanoma. 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 to 6 p.m. closed depends on mood. Please be aware that there is a cat in the house. That is the weirdest side of Japan that you see where there's just something advertising itself as a conversation house. Oh my God, yeah. 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 mass search parlors. 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 that should be a kidney theft house. Would you like to be not unconscious and wake up with less organs? Or you can put the organs on ice. This is my ice bath.

Just lying this ice bath. Yeah. But it could just be a nice little house with a cat. It could be. Where you get to meet someone who's at worst going to try and convert you to their religion or whatever. Right, exactly. I thought you guys went for longer than a week. But I mean, a week is 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. 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 fine. It was very clean and all the rest of it. But there was nowhere to sit. And I realized 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. 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. Yeah. I've got to have it. They're all like those little pod hotels and stuff too. Like they are, they are very limited on space. Oh yeah, 100%.

100%. It's kind of frantic though, like they're, I mean, going out for the day, you because you're jet lagged, you sort of wake up early, you know, you head out, you do some stuff. And some days, after a week or so there, I was like, oh, I might just not leave the, you know, the hotel today. Yeah. We had some days where we were like, let's not do anything today. Let's just relax. But yeah, then we'd be like, actually, let's go to the, 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, 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 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 like, oh, they've got the peach drink that we love. And again, it was like 50p, 60p. So you're just churning through all of 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 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. But 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 find a whale, they just stick the plastic bottles into their blowhole. Yeah, they're pretty. But the 7-Eleven's, 7-Eleven and Lawson's and Family Mart are the big three. We saw, it 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 we would, when we were out and about, we would regularly just stop in one and grab something to eat, get an onagiri or get some, which is like those little rice triangles. We'd get like Karagi, which is just fried chicken. You can get like terriaki skewers. And it's just there at the front of the shop. You just help yourself and it's cheapest chips and it's really delicious. And there's usually a cash point in there as well, which you need. 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 gacha machines, or this 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're waking up so early. And the first place we stayed in, which was in Tato 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 6 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. But this guy, he was like, oh, and ran around. Please stop speaking Japanese. You know, so that's how it felt. But I also, you know, he was also a problem just trying to be really helpful. But, yeah, that was funny.

And coffee, speaking of coffee, did you go to Kameda coffee? Did I go to K-M-A-A-C-M-A-A-C-O-M-E-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. I'm not a big coffee drink, it's P-Flex, so no, not really. I have one a day. I didn't have coffee there. But the commada coffee is like a chain of cafes, which are amazing.

Amazing. All of, 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 sandwich. Man, that'd be so, if you just took the egg, the mayonnaise and the ham out of that bad boy, or? Just a lettuce sandwich. But honestly, it was, if you, if you go to Japan,

go to Kameda 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 Niro and trying to think of some. Starbucks. Starbucks.

Yeah. And we got some other ones too, I'm sure. But it's it 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 a 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, Arugata goes, I must 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 you know 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 i'm just joking before we continue have you ever browsed in incognito mode because it's probably not as incognito as you think google recently settled a five billion dollar lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode Google's defense. Incognito does not mean invisible. In fact, all your online activity is visible to a ton of third parties. That is, unless you use ExpressVPN. With ExpressVPN, you can change your online location so you can control where platforms like Netflix think you're located, giving you thousands of new shows to watch. It's very easy to use. It works on all devices and the speed is blazing fast. There is no buffering that I've noticed and I can stream in HD. I use ExpressVPN at home.

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I realize I've been talking a lot, but I figured... No, no. It's interesting. I mean, I, 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 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?

We thought that was kind of cool. The big shopping district in, uh, in, in Tokyo. It's got like that, it was like 12, 12 crossing crosswalk. I think that's a perfect example, though, of period spending a week in Tokyo and not knowing what Shibuya is, like, one of the most famous crossing. You get off the train here at the train station and you get 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, but there's like all these crosswalks

and they all activate at the same time. So like, there's like a big X. that goes through, like, the middle of the traffic, but then on the, 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. Right. But it was quite a long day and there 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 I'd say, you know, my eldest is even more like that. So I went home with him and we were like, we'll just go back and chill. And my youngest and Mrs. F went to Shibuya and did all the shops and all the rest of it. Um, so they, they may well have seen it. I'm sorry, I missed it. But we did see

no, I mean, it's sort of that, the very fancy area where there's all the big shops. I think it's, I bought some one at Suki Tiger trainers. Yeah, I think it's such a big place that a lot of people like will have an idea of what like their quintessential is, but it's not the same as the next persons, you know, like. Right. Yeah, sure. It's, it is just that kind of place, you know, like, um, 100%. But, um, but yeah, I mean, like, I don't think, I don't think the, was it, Did you call the Sky Tree, the really tall? I'm not sure that that was even there when we went, because 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 Rupungi Hills, which is like quite a tall. They have them everywhere. Quite a tall tower, but we went up at night, which was really interesting. So we got to see the city. We did that in Kyoto. But the tower, this was after the Tokyo Sky Tree. So we went up this other town 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 a bit spoiled. 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 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 have a look. And that was, that was pretty interesting, too. I can't remember. They have those gates, although I can't remember what they're called, someone will know. It's like a red gate that is shaped like that, like an N, sort of like, not an uppercase end, but just imagine 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.

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 Shidot, so the government building might have been designed in that could have been, yeah. 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 someone 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 son of 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, last thing I'd 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 their ice hat was bone dry but all the sweat it's not insane

it was fabulous you have to do it sometimes yeah I had to wash this summer has been so hot I had to 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's stuff It really stunk. Oh, I had salt. Salt deposits. So you could see 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. It smells really nice now, but I tell you what. Nice hat. It 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, really Kawai characters and all this merch you could buy. And then alongside them, Disney is shoehorned in some of their tut. That just looks like shit.

Like when you see Mickey Mouse and Woody and Buzz Lighty next to this sort of array of fantastic Japanese characters, Disney looks like Wank. It looks so bad. Like, I was really just stunned how glaringly bad it looked compared to the Japanese equivalent. And I just could not believe how. 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 look good at all

by comparison to the Japanese stuff. That was kind of, of weird. I really did go quite kawai over there. I bought a lot of crap. I have a lot of dangly stuff. I've got this green lad. He's called... You bought a lot of dingle dangles. I did. He's called Smisky. He's a little glow-in-the-dark lad. He attaches to my phone, and he glows in the dark quite a lot when he 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 gatcham machines, like, we got a bunch of Sylvania family

stickers. So I got one of those on the back of my phone. My bag has this egg. There's this camera that's like an egg coming out of an eggshell. Why did you get Silvanian family stickers of all things? Boudatama. It's so yeah, Gutama. That's it. The egg. So I've got one of them. The Sylvania family, I think, is Japanese. It was everywhere, dude. Everywhere. That doesn't, it doesn't sound very Japanese to me, the Sylvania family. It sounds like an Italian or something. No, you know a family though, right? You know them. Yeah. Yeah, I know. With the Slovenian family.

Hey, is that Ricky rat in my bed? It's a fucking giraffe, with teddy bears all in here. We don't like no giraffe in his 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. And it was like, we went there at night. It's a shopping area. Like half the places in Tokyo seemed 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 tell you draw something, you draw a little stub, and it tells you open draw H-15, and you open it, and you take the top fortune and close the draw, and you read your fortune, and it's, 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 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 anywhere. 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. Oh, here is shocking. There's no cigarette butts. There's no bits of paper. 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. Well, in Jersey, I used to see it in Canada all the time. Like, you know, parts of the UK, like, if you're driving on the motorway or whatever,

there's shit everywhere. There's just garbage. It's the funny thing. We joke about this. We joke about this. We've been playing Geogessor a little bit. And there's this thing where if you put a street view man down anywhere in India, anywhere in India, I may mean it, there is every street is lined with litter. 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? where 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, like 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. 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's, it's, 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. Yeah. As soon as you, and you do this as a, look, when we, when I was growing up, you know, as a

teenager, I'm sure my mom and dad did the majority of the cleaning, right? And I didn't do shit, but you never had to like do the dishwasher or like clean the table, clear the dishes or anything. Like a little bit, like a little bit, but I was definitely like more of a slop, right? Yeah, I make my kids do that. 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. Already, where in the world. But I mean, you know, just things like the park, there's as parks around me. People would 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 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 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 boarish 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 laugh too loud, I was like, I'm being such a pain in the

ass now. I'm 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 boorish and like a terrible tourist. But we tried our best. I mean, we're not litter bugs 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 drop 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 give it a shit, judging into each other, litter everywhere, lost all this social cohesion that we had that they have clung onto, 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 where 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, 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 who that's who is very much like reading about. And 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 do all these medical experience with them. They had these, like, rooms where they took women and just the soldiers just, you know, did whatever they wanted with them all this kind of stuff. Like, terrible, 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... 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, in 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 people. If I put money on it now, reform wins the next election. Like, if we had the election now, they would be able with. 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, 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, the sick of the amount of tourists coming over here. They've been protesting about all of the. is all about anti-tourism as well, yeah, because it's just, it's absolutely ruining the local economy for everybody, right? Like, it's all foreign investments. Without the tourism, Spain is fucked. Yeah. Like, 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 like immigration. It's low-level racism of like, of people blaming, and then 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

it's a weird. It's a weird. 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, that we're, we're going to fix now. Like you, you wouldn't have the level of immigration that we, that we have in the first place had it not been for this requirement for for cheap labor all the time. throughout history, you know, like if, 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, um, it wouldn't, 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, um, you know, freezing wages at like, yeah, and just letting the private sector just, run rampant, basically. Well, here's the thing that I think's really funny with AI, right? So people, well, 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 don't know, do all the things.

And the air is like, no, no, I don't want to do that. I want to do the art. I want to do the music. Yeah, yeah. I want to do all the stuff that might bring you joy. and leave you with the drudgery. I don't want you to do all that fun create stuff. It's like, oh, no, no, no, that's, we can handle that.

And it's the same thing with, with some extent, 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, nursing or things that are actually like more. we need more more people doing these jobs and we are unwilling to do them because we see them as below us in some way

and 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 bin man

You know, it's seen as like too, not good enough. If these jobs actually just paid a 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 to do. 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. Yeah, it's completely.

It's bizarre that the worst jobs are the ones that pay the least. Yeah. It's backwards. Right. And it's largely due to a exploitation 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, that the socialist governments in the world don't recognize that. Yeah.

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, we went to the temple area. We went across a lake on this big boat, which was a day. stunning, brought a tear to my eye, went up a mountain on a cable car to a sulfur mine.

So you went up mount, you went up on a cable cart, Mount Fooge? Nice. Did you go down to the source of the core source of the mine and find my ass? 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 right. I used to go to a, just like your butt. I used to go to a summer camp. Well, I went one year I went to 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 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. I'm sure somebody listening probably has been to Cumberland before and knows. There's certain places like that, like in Rotorua in New Zealand,

like towns that are just built around this like stinky sulfur vents. I cannot imagine living near it. You can drive it, you know, driving into it. You can, you can, you can. It was wrong. 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 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. That happens. It's hugely, like, you could see hints of it, little hints. And then we were like, all right, I was shy that day.

He was very shy. So we got on the coach, we went down to this place where we were 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, 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 100. 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.

You feel 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 right 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 seemed to have sort 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, honkered their horns. That was the least Japanese thing that I saw was they're 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-K cars, it's K-E-I,

and it's like the most Kawai 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 compressed all of the sort of airspace in it down to the smallest manageable size, that would be one of these vans. And they're all driving around at the speed 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 flatbeds. You can import them, but they're expensive. But yes, I merely 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 ExpressVPN 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 my phone, it was like, no, that's not available in your region. So I'd have to VPN to get to like my Madman series, for example. But that still doesn't Magnum series. Mad Men.

Oh, sorry. I thought you were watching Magnum PI. No, sorry. Madman. He's still that old, right. So you take a picture and go, so that you can't, like, all these lads were upskirting women on the trains and stuff like that. That was one thing.

Smoking, can't smoke anywhere, can't vape anywhere in Japan, 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. It's like outside, like all over the sidewalks. Yeah, it's like, no. 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 in Japan.

That's what Mrs. Edward was, she called it the cupboard of shame. Yeah, it would be like, he would kind of be in a sad, like a phone booth style box with events. With a bunch of middle-aged lads. And these younger lads are smoking this thing. 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. You just pull your cannon out and the clouds start appearing. You're like a weather. They were not impressed. You're like a weather weapon. You're a weather generator. Because they had all this smokeless shit. And I'm like, weak fat clouds. And they're like, oh, fucking foreigners. We went to Nara. which is this temple with deer. Yeah. Awful.

Worst trip. 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 pigeon thing all I forget. 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 lightly, I mean like someone has got a stapler and stapled your ass. That's how much it hurt. So I turned around and just threw the biscuits at this pack of deer. And they were like, ra, ravenous. And my youngest is running away from this deer. And I said, just throw the biscuits. Throw the biscuits.

And my eldest is just filming her and laughing. 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 on, 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 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 like brooch or whatever yeah how how fascinating look we're going to have to pick this up next time okay I've still got plenty to talk can I just quickly quickly tell you something that I did yesterday I went to see some puppies you're getting a dog no I'm not getting a dog no I my our friends just got two Jack Russell puppies

a brother and a sister combo and man they're so cute but I'm not getting dogs I won't get any did this lighten up your life did it I raise your spirits

no it's just I don't mind puppies I think they're I think they're pretty good so I want to see them and I'm gonna go see them did it remind you of when your babies

were young and cute no really no 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 hyenas sometimes too they're like biting each other and stuff it was really good it was fun they're really cute they're

small 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're getting them all whipped up and everything and then they just fell asleep yeah they'll just get like clunked out yeah and then they woke up and some food and stuff it was good it was really fun we're gonna say If they'll come over and play with Terry at some point, but we'll see how it goes. Sure. Terry ain't go like that. It's like a grandpa with two toddlers running around.

You should see 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.

He's making the most of it. His best life. Yeah. Until he goes back in the fridge. Well, I'm so glad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's get his ass back in that fridge. Well, he's the, he's English. You know, he makes him use of the two months. Yeah, two months, a nice weather that he gets. That's it. Yeah. But it's nearly over now. Yeah.

Man, they are, they are so cute, though, puppies. But I wouldn't have any. Oh, I see. They're just too much work. Especially too. Oh, my God. We left Aggie with my mom for two weeks while we went away. And my mom fell in love with her.

She's known Aggie for years, of course, whenever she comes up to stay. Yeah. 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, I don't know, 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.

But I wouldn't change it for the world. We love having her. And I think it's nice for kids to have a pet. Yeah, I think so too. 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 time. So it's a good lesson for the kids to sort of. of say, hey, you can't leave that there.

You've got to think about the dog. You've got to think about this. Yeah. It's good. Well, we, 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 puppies before.

Like, she's been around dogs. But, like, it's funny. It's quite rare to be around puppies, isn't it? Like, you could probably go a whole life and not be around, like, a little puppy. Like, they're kind of rare. you're 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. No, no. Their teeth are like. Yeah, yeah. They don't know what they're doing. And and I think they play with you if you're playing with them. But like they're not playing with them that, you know, they're not going to really bite you and stuff. Even even when they're really small. Like they're quite quite smart really. So yeah. So yeah. No, I know what you mean though. I think it's good. So yeah. No, I know what you mean though. I think it's good. for kids to be around animals and know how to how to treat them and stuff like our kids are around like the tortoise and guinea pigs and stuff but they they're different animals you know

like guinea pigs like you can you can get them out and cuddle them and stuff but they they are just like deathly afraid of everything that moves in the world sort of thing so it's it's a bit 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... Well, I'll 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.

They're nasty. They're not. This thing was huge. Yeah. 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.

Oh, I hate that. And I was, I screamed like a baby. Yeah. And then I had to catch in a glass. It was so fucking big. Oh, my God. And the spiders. way more to go through from japan we're going to do part two we'll do part two but thank you everyone

and until next time we'll see you then see you all right oh my god all right bye bye bye bye bye Thank you very much.