Jan 24
Today we spent the day exploring Osaka a bit more. In the morning we got up and headed to Takarazuka, home to an apparently reputable all-female theatre company and the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum (creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion). However, neither of these were our targets and we spent a couple of hours in the Takarazuka Garden Fields, which is basically a dog park. You pay 600 yen entry and get to bring your dog to a semi-large-ish oval with lots of different dog courses, but basically the attraction I guess is to just bring your dog and let it play with others. There’s also a pen of maybe 25 different dogs, of all kinds of breeds, which you can rent for half an hour for 800 yen. We didn’t do this but spent 45 minutes or so patting them. Lots of them were in winter coats, with a small toy poodle and a large chocolate Labrador in a kind of Dorothy the Dinosaur get-up, so we nicknamed them Dogosaurus and Dogzilla respectively… Prue was going gaga, and bought her dog a stuffed doughnut toy. We had a lunch that was basically an omelette shaped into a kind of croissant stuffed with rice, bits of bacon and veg, and topped with tomato sauce. It was delicious.

We left Takarazuka and headed to Osakajokoen station, or Osaka Castle Park station, which are the grounds surrounding the castle. There seemed to be a concert on in the stadium next to the castle, or maybe it’s just because it was a Sunday afternoon, but there were hordes of people in the gardens around the castle, with bands playing and carnival style food being sold by vendors. One band was actually really good, got some on film and wouldn’t be surprised if they’re signed, and there was an older Japanese man dancing hilariously to the music that Prue pointed out, which we also got on tape, hoorah! We walked up the path to the castle, and took some photos, the setting is breathtaking. We didn’t go in though as we’re saving our castle experience for Himeji – basically the best castle in Japan, it’s huge, beautiful and all original – it’s never been destroyed by warfare.

We headed back to the city centre after stopping by a big fountain to see kids playing on unicycles and foot-half-skateboards (which Australia probably won’t see for a couple of years? they were bizarre) and spent an hour or so wondering around Amerika-Mura, which is Osaka’s take on an American village, filled with clothing stores and teenagers – basically Osaka’s Harijuku. There’s a mini Statue of Liberty on top of one of the buildings. It would probably be really interesting to go and watch in the summer, and there were lots of teenagers about (it’s a Sunday night), but not all that many dressed bizarrely. We saw a girl in a bright pink kind of maid’s outfit (like something from a Gwen Stefani clip) - she must’ve been FREEZING, and an old guy dressed in jeans, piercings and a bright sparkly t-shirt with bling on it hanging out with a bunch of teenagers, which was kind of weird.

It was getting dark and we headed back to Umeda again, went to go to the Pokémon Centre again but it was closed, we were tired, hungry and sick of walking again so came back to the hostel. I finally figured out that there’s good wireless reception in the hallway so can now use Skype, yay!

Before I finish off this entry though, just a little rant on Japan. I still can't get over the bizarre contradictions in Japanese culture. It's not okay to show affection, but it's okay for men's toilets to have no doors (you walk past and see them peeing) and have female cleaners in there, and it’s okay to have disgustingly eroticised naked sexual figurines of children in shops, and suggestive posters of young girls on the streets. You shouldn't eat/drink on the street, but there's hundreds of vending machines, basically at least two every twenty metres, which nobody seems to touch, and basically no bins for rubbish anywhere (apart from bottle/can recycling ones next to the vending machines). I’ve seen five or six repairmen fixing vending machines, yet only once have I seen people buy something from them, and I must’ve walked past hundreds. Despite the eating/drinking in public taboo (which we’ve been ignoring), there's no limits to smoking inside. Everywhere you go there’s the smell of smoke, with people smoking in arcades or pachinko parlours – today at lunch, inside the café, the two men at the table next to us were smoking, which was disgusting. You shouldn't walk around on tatami floors with shoes because it’s dirty, yet there's basically never hand soap except in public toilets, and sometimes no toilet paper. The novelty of getting stared at has worn off and is getting a bit irritating... but apart from all of that, almost every single person we've come across has been amazingly understanding, hospitable and friendly.

Oh, and ther’s a complete and utter LACK OF BENCHES. Walking around for hours, it’s painfully rare to ever see a place to sit unless it’s to pay to eat and sit down in a restaurant. No wonder the Japanese are so healthy, they never sit down in public unless they’re eating. >_>

So now I’m finally caught up to date with my blog. Yay! Though virtually nobody is reading this and it’s quite boring. I’ll hopefully figure out what photos to use and post them soon.

Jan 23
We spent the day visiting Namba (again), Den Den Town and Shinkesai. Den Den Town is basically one of the best locations in the world to buy electronics apparently (32 inch Bravias for like ¥800 O_o’), and is an 800m or so strip of basically electronics stores of every variety and comic stores in between which also sell capsule toys, figurines etc. We got the train to Namba, went looking for Den Den Town, finally found it, walked down it, got to the end, and realised that Shinsekai was at the end of it. Shinkesai is the suburb next to ours (Shin-Imamiya); we could’ve walked to Den Den Town in like 15 minutes but instead had a one and half hour process finding it… le sigh. We had lunch in an awesome fast food noodle bar, which was rice, beef, onion, miso soup and salad, and was amazingly delicious. We went back to find a capsule machine we’d had to miss before due to a lack of hundred yen coins (I now have a Stitch coin purse that I bought from a hundred yen store solely for the purpose of keeping hundred yen coins) and got three figurines – I got a little caricature of an American and a Japanese guy, and Prue got an Austrian guy. The other three countries you can get are Italy, the UK and Germany. We wanted them ‘cause they were awesome little flag people, but I realised that they were all powers from WWII, and the German looked kind of Nazi-like… we then looked at the name of the series – it’s ‘World Axis’. UK/USA v Japan/Germany/Austria/Italy. WTF?!?!?! So wrong yet hilarious and cute as hell capsule thingies. We each want to go back and get the rest of the set. >_> After that we wondered around a bit and headed to Shinsekai.

Shinsekai was established in the 1980s and literally means ‘New World’, but because of the economic bust at the same time, the area was badly affected by the building industry that collapsed around it and lots of people lost their jobs (hence the higher than average homeless rate around our area), and so the place is kind of stuck in the 80s as far as its resemblance, but it’s freakin cool. It looks kind of like the streets from Blade Runner, it had a lot of older shops which were a mix of discount stores, arcades, pachinko parlours (THESE ARE EVERYWHERE in Osaka, at least one a block), clothes stores etc. Even the capsule machines here were a couple of years old, with Ratatouille and Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart figurines that I hadn’t seen anywhere else in Osaka, which was great because I got some of the Nintendo ones I was looking for. ^_^ Though I ended up with Peach, so, bleh to her. Our feet were killing us so we basically went to bed and had an earlyish night. Yay!