Name: Planning Your Japan Trip, Ask me (September 2024)
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T17:43:53.000Z
Duration: 6 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past continuous

Yesterday, Matt, Alton and I were at Nakano Broadway where we were walking around, kind of comparing Nakano to Akihabara.

I think Nakano is more of an authentic experience, travel experience in Tokyo than Akihabara is.

Akiba feels like a tourist trap, I think mainly because there's just more international tourists there.

Things are definitely more expensive, Nakano being the most densely populated city in all of living in each square kilometer, so you have such an amazing diversity of foods and tastes and all sorts of things.

Great for subculture, anime, manga, so go check out that video.

Let me know your thoughts on if you think Nakano is a more authentic, better experience for a visit than Akihabara, which over the last five, seven years has really changed from what was an authentic otaku experience to, yeah, a tourist attraction.

Nothing wrong with that, just it's changed and it's different than it was before.

The reason I'm making this episode is that I want to now solicit questions from all of you, like I did about a month ago when I was in Shibuya.

I asked you for specific questions that I can make episodes that only in Japan go about, and we got so many of them, I wanted to ask for some fresh questions now.

Things that are really specific, if I didn't use your question the first time, ask again, but maybe get more specific with your question, or if it helps the whole community, maybe get more broader and ask it a little bit in more detail so I can make it more useful.

Maybe just questions that seem elementary are probably what a lot of people are thinking.

I'm surprised whenever I see a viral post about Japan on Instagram or YouTube or something, people send me email messages and I might get about 20 of the same message asking people, like, is this true or is this happening or have you been to this place before?

And that's kind of funny because we're all sort of thinking about the same things, the same ways to travel, and if we can address some of those things, that actually helps a lot of the people who are missing some of those obvious attractions, obvious ways to see the country, obvious places, and I think that there must be some kind of benefit to being a subscriber to this channel, which I'm so thankful for.

This is part of that benefit because we have such an amazing community.

So many of them are traveling around Japan right now.

You can check it out on our Discord server, which is a free download.

It's a community of about 18,000 people that are sharing photos, food, experience.

We have people right now traveling Japan that are asking questions to the community about where to stay, places to go, what are your thoughts about this.

You can test your ideas out in the server about where to go in Japan and you'll hear some pros and cons from people who are either there now or have been there recently.

So it's kind of like what was the thorn trees of Lonely Planet back in 2003 when the Internet was still pretty young.

So I like that our Discord server is very much like that.

And we have a wonderful community of great people who are helping each other.

I actually have this watermelon right here on the floor and it's been about six weeks since I got it.

I'm seeing how long it can go before it starts to show some tear.

There are some marks down here where it got a little bit scratched.

The scratches are starting to brown over.

But, you know, it's fresh in this episode is coming on the main channel.

The other channel is more edited in-depth stories about Japan that I kind of manicure and groom in the best way possible.

And they take a little bit more time to upload.

But yeah, there's some new episodes coming this fall.

Thank goodness we have passed through what they say is the hottest summer in Japan.

I don't remember what last summer was like, so I tend to agree with them.

Every summer seems like the hottest one because Japanese summer is just it's kind of uncomfortable.

So I'm looking forward to autumn where we're already seeing in the first week of September the chestnuts, the sweet potatoes, the gosh, so many delicious foods that come out in the fall, the pumpkins.

And, you know, I think a fall might be the most delicious time to visit Japan.

I visited all 47 prefectures a minimum of three times.

If I can get the saga a couple more times, I think that that's on a cue shoe that might take me up to five or six.

I've moved 16 different times to 16 different cities around Japan, including three times within Tokyo, two times within Nagoya.

So I kind of know Japan and living here fairly well.

You can ask me about how Japan was 25 years ago compared to today, because I know that kind of stuff, what it was like living through the earthquake.

Ask me anything that you think is going to be relevant to your fellow viewers.

Again, I want this channel to be, you know, having a subscription on Only Japan Go is a benefit to great information that we can get out to you like right away, because this is a live streaming channel.

When something happens, it's kind of fun to be able to go out there like when there was a robbery in Ginza.

I remember going out there like trying to see what the what the action out out there was like in a safe way, of course.

But this is what this channel is all about.

It's an experimental channel where I can take you to places and share things with you in a long format live.

So the episodes are a little bit longer compared to the main channel where everything is, you know, edited in a mannatured fashion.

And, you know, I'm looking forward to doing even more content, which is why these questions are gonna be pretty fun.

So I'm looking forward to what you have to ask.

And I will get back to you in another live stream in another episode as soon as possible.