Hey guys! Welcome to Oita in Japan. I'm Norm and this is Shiori!
I am kind of taking over from Emma today hosting this video– actually just as Emma left,
I arrived and so yeah! We have been here... how many days now?
This is day 5...?
I think the first day was the busiest. What did we do on the first day?
We went to Beppu. We did so many things. We woke up so early!
I think our day kicked off at something like 7 o'clock in the morning and then, what was the first thing we did that day?
That was the suna-yu!
Oh my goodness! Let's give a little bit of a description of what the suna-yu was. Do you want to explain it?
The aunties dig a hole in the sand and then you will just lie there and relax for 15 minutes.
Yeah, but they cover you with sand right?
Yup, with the sand. And then you only have your head out of the sand so you look so... what is it.. suspicious.
I'm not sure this description is correct or not but...
Suspicious is a perfect Shiori description. It's absolutely perfect.
But you have a nice little umbrella to prevent you from the brightness of the sun.
It was really bright actually! Yeah! It was more pressure than I expected.
Yeah, yeah! It's quite heavy. What did you think about the experience?
At first, I thought it was the most relaxing thing ever because
it's like a weighted blanket, so you're like, "oh this is really comfortable!" but
you can't move your arms or your legs and then you start to itch. I had one piece of
like sweat running down and then going like, "Oh I can't itch it, I can't itch it!"
Right! But you actually put your thumbs up.
Yeah, yeah! Right through the sand.
Right! But suna-yu is one short-time activity because you can only do 15 minutes at one go.
So if you only have a short amount of time but you want to relax, you want to sweat and refresh a bit,
I think this is a really good way to experience the onsen culture in Japan.
And it's really famous here in Beppu too, right?
Like the day before, I was hanging out with another TC member, Dogen and that
was the first thing he suggested: "Why don't we go to the sand baths?".
We didn't go but yes, I'm glad I got to go. What did we do after that?
After that, we went through the very very beautiful mountain!
I think we were not sure where we were because-
It doesn't look like Japan at all!
It's one of the best views to enjoy!
But maybe for you as a creator, it's very fun to be there to shoot, right?
It was fun to be there and it was like high pressure because I was like, "do we have five minutes?" , "do we have 20 minutes?"
"How many pictures can I get?", "How many videos can I get?". I really liked it! That was nice.
We moved on pretty quickly from there and went to...
I forgot!
Rakuten-chi! Yes, yes, yes, sorry! The mountain-top theme park!
You've been living in Asakusa for a while so you can compare Hanayashiki and Rakuten-chi, I guess because Rakuten-chi is 90 years old!
Yeah and Hanayashiki is like the oldest theme park in Japan, if you
don't know what it is, but I think the fact that you get to take the cable car
and the fact that Rakuten-chi is not crowded– for me, Rakuten-chi wins.
Because Hanayashiki is great. It's one of those places where, from the outside it
looks this big and then when you go inside, it's this big!
I've always liked that but it's crowded.
I hated lining up for rides as a kid but here, you actually can be like a kid and enjoy the nice little rides as well.
I like the roller coaster the most! It was so fun.
This is actually the first place I've been to in Japan where people would
get off the ride and line back up because of the line, right? That's how NOT crowded it was.
Yeah, I think I can try most of the rides because I'm only 150cm so maybe I can try more rides. He was joking around so much and making so many small jokes.
Oh! The ice-cream there was also really nice.
And after Rakuten-chi, we drove a bit and went to the Jigoku-dani (Hell Night).
Yes! The Beppu Hells! Ah that was nice!
You actually went there with Dogen, right? The day before.
Dogen showed me around the area
and he knew so much about it so he took me to all the like– the little back
streets where the steam is coming up from the street and that's why, like at
night, that river that I took you guys to,
Dogen showed that to me and we actually had food-steamed, hot-spring steamed food, yeah.
It was good!
What did you think of it?
I don't know why but I feel like all the vegetables were softer than usual and it was so nice.
So you know how like the onsen, sulfur steam kind of smells like eggs, right? So,
to me like the egg tasted extra eggy. Does that make sense? That the egg tasted extra eggy? The egg was very pungent!
And because the egg was a different color, right?
Yeah, yeah! So it was a really dark colored egg.
It was a nice day one. That was pretty much what we did, and the next day, we went to Yufu City! How was that?
I personally loved the drive into it... so much! And the city itself... I was
surprised because Beppu was so quiet but Yufu is so popular!
You're right– I feel like it had the vibes of Asakusa or Kyoto– touristy areas but there was so much
energy because the town itself is so beautiful so we kept walking
around and then checking the small souvenir shops are very fun. The museum! The Showa Era museum!
I love those places.
Right! So fun!
Like, it makes you feel like nostalgic, even if you're not like--
I wasn't in Japan during that period but like any time like, when
I first came to Japan back in like in 2005, every single time I would visit
friends grandparents or something, their house looked like that room that we sat
in, right? So. Welcome to a new segment we're doing here on TV Play where I just sit
with Shiori in unique places and talk about stuff and things. The first
thing that I ever became obsessed with in Japan was dagashi (penny candy) so like to
see the dagashi setups and stuff like that– so you get like this kind of
feel like these type of chairs and something. They actually keep some of this stuff in Tokyo
they actually have little, like games, yeah! These phones are usually black, right?
Yeah, that's why they call them like black phone, right? We have them in all
different colors! It didn't have to be black. One of my friends was telling
me that after the earthquake when phones wouldn't connect, they connected their
old black phone and it still worked!
Really? So this is like their emergency phone then?
So this is the sento (public bath) entrance. So usually here, obaa-san or ojii-san (grandma or grandpa) is waiting–
the reception, a lady or man is already waiting for the customer and the men
entering from here, and women come in from here and where the cameraman is positioned, there should be a wall
but this person can see both the naked men and naked women, collecting the
money to enter the sento or onsen. It's so interesting right?
After that, we ate soba and then we drove back to the hotel, where we took a bit of a rest before shooting stars.
We wanted to do some night photography. That didn't play out the way we expected it to though.
It was fun! How do I say it? We really wished we could've filmed those extra fun moments... could you explain what happened to us?
So basically, we got out there! We got out into the mountains and we were like all excited and then all
the clouds came over and then the drive was much longer than we were initially
expecting and we've been driving something like four days when we
realized that we still had a 20 or 30 minute drive to go. All gas stations
anywhere in like a a 40 kilometer radius were all closed and we were on one bar of gas left.
But, Norm is a very, very, very awesome specialist for cars as well. Huh? You think your fans know about that?
You know, the people who watch my channel know a bit about how I used to do a lot of car stuff in
Japan. That's kind of how I started before I did YouTube and before I did shamisen.
But I think that if you were a fan of Norm recently from Tokyo Creative, maybe you don't
know much about how crazy he is and incredible he is. He was so smooth (while driving) like skiing because we were like
panicking, "oh no! Only one bar of the gas left so how should we get to the gas station?!" So most of
TC crew were like "please Norm! Try your hardest" and he said, "don't worry, I can do it!". And then after that it was like skiing. There were so many curves down the mountain but
me, T-man (Japanese sales staff) and Kenji (camera man) were behind his car and he was like swish, swish!
He legitimately didn't use any brakes because we were looking at his brake lights. It was amazing!
it was because we didn't use the gas either! We made it to
the gas station though, everything worked out! We made it there just as the the gas
went to zero, so. All worked out!
That was dramatic! I guess you guys took videos of you guys dancing in the night or something like that. That's totally behind the scenes.
We're like waiting for you guys and like, dancing in the mountains in front
of car lights. I guess that brings us up to today:
We did so much today, didn't we! We went
to Saiki City! It was my first time for me to visit there. How was it?
It was really nice! Especially getting up in the mountain and the lunch!
So we ordered the Shio-Koji Gozen.
And I got the Kaisen-don. I love a good Kaisen-don.
Actually everything. I could just right now just make a list of everything
that was nice but it was everything that we did, yeah so.
We went to the Koji factory, which has lasted for 330 years.
Koji means... sorry I can't really explain it in English nicely.
It's like a micro-organism. It's actually used a lot with a whole
bunch of different stuff. Like, it's used for things like sake, it's used for cooking,
it's used for pickling vegetables and whatnot.
Koji is used for any seasonings. Every single meal, has some kind of koji as seasoning or as salt.
So this one has a lot of umami and I've learned so many things from
Myoho-san and it was so interesting. I love her so much!
Oh my god. She was like probably one of the... outside of the food and the company, she
was probably the best part of today!
And she explained to us so many things about Japanese food culture as well.
Food definitely helps with family bonding. Is that correct? Bonding?
That works!
I love cooking but personally I don't use Koji for my cooking. But luckily, we got a sample
from her so I'm thinking to start cooking with Koji more often from now on.
It was like through Koji and stuff like that is a more traditional way of cooking.
Very traditional mom's seasoning for Japanese washoku (Japanese-style food) food so I need to learn how to maximize
this Koji power. I think we are going to talk about Koji in Tokyo Creative News in more
details later so please check the link down below.
After lunch, we climbed up to the Saiki Castle.
It's like that the remains or ruins or– there wasn't actually any castle ruins but it's where the castle was and they told
us it was a 15 minute climb.
But?
It wasn't a 15 minute climb...
Nice to meet you!
But on the nice side, when we got up there, it was really hot. The view was gorgeous, and
then it cooled us down with a nice brisk rain.
It's so hot but it's worth it!
It was definitely worth it, yeah.
So this is all of Saiki City!
You can see my house! I'm joking!
I know where you live!
The hike was nice.
Yeah, the hike was nice.
Yeah, I guess that brings us up to now. I always like to recap on the trip and ask if you had a favorite moment but it's a dangerous question for me
right now because I don't have a favorite moment. I loved literally the whole thing.
But I have one actually.
What's that?
Well, this trip, Norm took a bunch of strange pictures of me.
When you were hanging out of a car, very like, !I've been kidnapped!"
Yeah... so that was a thing. My train is in like ten minutes.
Oh no!
I hate to do this but I'm gonna have to get going.
Thank you for coming!
Well, thank you for having me! If you guys had
a particular spot or something in this video that you liked the most
let us know down below. If you're new to the channel, I'd say subscribe but maybe
go check out a couple more TC Play videos, leave us some comments so we can
see where you have been! Thank you guys so much for joining, thank you for having me.
It was fun!
And don't forget to subscribe to Tokyo Lens as well!
Thank you guys once more, and we will see you again, real soon.
Bye!!