Osaka

Osaka is a funny city. It's said to be the commercial capital of Japan and it shows: even the population of the city blooms by more than a million, come day time, from the nightly 2.6 million permanent residents.

First 2 nights I stayed in a hotel right next to Shin-Imamiya railway/subway station, waiting for my local friends to get their holiday gear on so I could crash at their place. I didn't really have a good idea about the general layout of the city at that point, but still my inner radar managed to walk me directly into Shinsekai and vicinity of Tsutenkaku Tower. Very interesting place once the sun sets. It's only later that I learned it is the de facto stay-out-if-you-are-a-lonely-woman area in the city, the closest thing to a bad neighborhood the city has. On the hindsight it was kinda clear, considering the nature of many of the little shops there. I did snap a nice photo there, as a mother and her young son were buying coffee from a vending machine, right next to them a life-size poster of a naked chick with an expression like someone was jamming a telephone pole up her nether-regions (this being Japan, they might just have been doing exactly that). Sorry, not going to post the photo here, I have a nice-guy reputation to uphold. :)

Tsutenkaku Tower.

Many Billikens around the city.

If this was China, I'd be suspecting something, but I guess ol'Tommy-Lee is actually getting paid for this.

The hotel I stayed in was a capsule hotel, by the way. However, as I couldn't fit into the little plastic coffins – being an adult-sized adult and all – they gave me a regular room (with a private bathroom/shower) for the same price instead. 17 euros a night in a private room of a downtown hotel is a pretty good deal in Osaka.

Had a long walk around the area at 7am in the morning, slurping on 40-cent vending machine coffee. Shinsekai be swarming homeless people, many of them from other parts of Japan, having escaped the shame of being poor and homeless under the noses of people who might have known them in their previous lives. These people weren't like the suburban riverside hobos with their home theaters and whatnot, nonono, these are almost proper homeless. They both looked and smelled like shit. From the early morning they wander around the streets in small packs or – being of self-employed persuasion – sell porno on the sidewalks, apparently mostly to old dudes, who stop to discuss the minute details of the going exchange rate between squeaking girls on DVD/CD/VHS and cold, hard yen, whenever they spot a sufficiently large pair of J-boobies. Japanese guys can be almost as hopeless in this regard as their American counterparts. It's funny how some of the homeless approached me, as I was lurching by, and started speaking to me in very much passable English. When you fall in a country without a safety net, you fall for a long time, and when you finally hit the bottom, it hurts. A lot of the homeless seemed to buddy up with each other, keeping company, helping the sick ones and so forth. Didn't see the Hobo Hills I witnessed in Paris, though, where on cold nights one stays warm any which way one can, and if one doesn't have matches to set one's buddies on fire with, at least one can still take in some of their rather aromatic body heat. The more the merrier.

Internet access in Japan is quite nice and in a whole lot of places completely free – no complains there, surprise, surprise. In New Zealand I'm already used to there being only one 1MB line connecting the country to the rest of the planet, which results in connectivity being sold by megabytes at prices that make harvesting organs from playground children for extra cash seem only mildly objectionable.

Found my way into Dōtonbori later that afternoon. Namba-Dōtonbori-Nipponbashi area could be said to form the southern center of the city, Umeda parts being the northern capital. Dōtonbori's surroundings are probably the biggest collection of shopping streets I've ever seen, some of them covered, some not, split by a river and spotted by local landmarks and tiny restaurants.

It was horribly crowded. Golden Week really is a special time to be snooping around Japan, and not necessarily in a good way.

Next to Namba Station, a rather large arcade.

The games within are interesting even from a professional point of view. Here's a neat little interface combining Magic The Gathering style card play with RFID chips for interactive gameplay and all sorts of cool effects. Who needs imagination? :) (Yea, that guy wearing a coffee filter is playing the role of a football manager. I guess in the west you need to wallow disturbingly deep into the world of tabletop RPGs to find anything comparable.)

How about this, then? They are sitting in their fancy chairs, betting on a virtual horse race that plays out just as slowly as a real horse race. Some of them seem to spend their entire days in this way, judging by the amount of cans and cigarettes they are packing.

As I've hinted before, I do not have to do my clothes shopping in the children's department, which enabled me to view the vistas over the churning black seas of thick Asian hair. There really wasn't any end to either the shops or the people, no matter how far I walked. I actually made it through a 500-meter stretch of shops selling almost purely kitchen items. And cakes in the shape of boobies. Either the Japanese mothers don't breast-feed their spawn, or they breast-feed them for too long. Shopping-wise, there was no entering the shops with their narrow corridors, unless I was prepared to inflict some serious damage on the little people. Luckily I got plenty opportunities to strengthen the Japanese economy later. Buying loads of useless junk has never been my thing, but there it just seemed like the proper thing to do.

Funny noodle shop. Buy a food stamp outside from the vending machine and get the food inside. Did they get sued by a mute person in the past or something? Why not just directly order from the cook dude, who would be filling your order anyway?

Also in Dōtonbori, I saw a tall, blond guy approaching me at one point, his head hovering a good stretch above the crowd. Now that there was a Scandinavian dude, if I had ever seen one, I thought. Yep, that be exactly what I told myself, might have even said it aloud, since everyone was staring at me even more than they usually did. When the guy finally passed me, I heard him talking to his family trailing him in Finnish. We are so easy to spot, aren't we...

Dōtonbori's famous mechanical crab. It moves around rather clumsily, but apparently has been hanging there since who-knows-when.

The shops in the area sell this and that, and if you want to find anything in the city, Dōtonbori is a good place to start your search in. Visiting a well-known shop for very random items indeed, called Don Quixote, I got some cheap laughs from articles such as things sporting pictures of Obama with the “Yes We Can” slogan, right next to them rubber negro masks for proper fans, and next to those huge afro wigs. This is Japan, racism is part of the deal, accept it or stay the hell away.

Don Quixote shop along the canal and a ferris wheel thing. Not in operation these days.

Me halutaan olla neekereitä, halutaan olla...

Met my friends on the third day in town and moved to their nice little apartment in a very nice suburb filled with parks and that stuff you get, where you don't have huge crowds, breathing space. The building was a bit old and I needed some serious dodging to avoid damaging the concrete with my skull, but the apartment itself was very charming with its tiny tatami rooms, sliding doors and an ofuro the size of a bucket. I do think that in Finland a 4-room apartment of barely 50 square meters would get people scratching their heads, though.

Now that I got me some guides, my sightseeing picked up pace once more. Returned to Dōtonbori and Nipponbashi, and found out that I had missed almost all the rocks that the video game, manga and anime otakus of the country shun away from the sunshine under. Lovely places with many an interesting objects for sale and equally many man-children, whose primary hobby seemed to be whacking off to action figures. I did my best to find something to buy, but failed rather miserably, mostly because all the manga/anime titles I recognize were the ones from 10-20 years ago.

Also visited more temples and stuff. The monk taking care of this one seemed to be living very comfortably indeed. I'd love to some day get a house that nice... (not in the pic)

On the next day I met another blast from the past, as I was re-acquainted with Chie, a comrade-in-arms from the days in Beijing. This lovely, lovely lady never ceases to amaze me with just how similar both our personalities and interests are(undoubtably to the horror of anyone who knows me well). Together we made it to Umeda, the northern central city of Osaka, talking mostly of video games, anime and Yoko Kanno's music after briefly recapping the year since I last said bye-bye to her in Wudaokou, Beijing. In Umeda we elevated ourselves to the top of the Umeda Sky Building. As a popular date destination it was swamped with wedding-related commercialism, but we were there for the fantastic 360-degree view, honestly.

Later on, games shopping, arcades touring, expensive ice cream bars, late-night dining in 40th floor restaurants with panoramic views and other general mucking-about, as well as cooking dinner and getting jolly drunk in the aforementioned mini-family-apartment. The stuff of holidays, my friends. Really a lovely week. :)

UFO-Catcher. You control the grappling arm and try to pick up prices. Very difficult, because the arm is flimsy as hell.

Sometimes the prices were a bit... strange, like toasters. Here's one with salami sausages.

Ingredients: Rice... and stuff.

Making Okonomiyaki with the troops.

Before ending my holiday I still had time for a quick two-day tour in Hiroshima, where I did all sorts of not-exactly-respectful things around the numerous memorials around the city. That's for the next entry, though, this one already reads like half a novel...

Nozomi-Shinkansen, fastest choo-choo in Japan.