Odds And Yens: Hanshin Henshin, Part 2

If you can get over the claustrophobia then I highly recommend capsule hotels for a good night's sleep. I was going to need it for the 30km ride to Osaka through uncharted lands plus the 10-15km I'd be doing within the city. By 9AM it was already hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk and the cicadas--my god, the cicadas--they are more deafening in morning than any other time of day! I want to burn down all their treetop perches and drive them from the land, I hate them! But perhaps not as much as I hated the ride between cities.

There are three cities that lie between Kobe and Osaka, and they are in order: Ashiya, Nishinomiya and Amagasaki. Ashiya is the only one I would consider habitable by human beings while the other two are no less than levels of hell. These are the industrial suburbs of the Hanshin metro area where 10-20 story sterile concrete apartment towers share zoning with chemical factories, port facilities and various light industries. Where the industry fades away and there are just apartment blocks it's still soulless and depressing, trading the choking haze of production for pachinko and that new craze sweeping Japanese commerce, the big box retail store. To add salt on the wound there was road construction on highway 2 virtually the entire way through the three cities.

But I survived the fetid wasteland in one piece (and all it cost me was half a lung!) and crossed the Yodo River into Osaka City proper. Finally familiar turf! Since I hadn't hit it up on previous trips I swung around towards the Umeda Sky Building, one of the city's (and nation's) most recognizable structures. I'm not huge into architecture, but the bold and acrobatic design of the Umeda Sky Building really makes an impression when you see it up close, and even moreso when you climb it. At the top floor observation deck not only can one get a 360-degree view of the city, there is also a cafe/lounge, fancy pants restaurant and a perplexing presentation on the past, present and future of skyscraper observatories that came off as hyper-pretentious. Your building is nice, but it's no Tower of Bable, Lighthouse of Alexandria or Eiffel Tower, to name but of few of its claimed contemporaries.

All hail the great UFO building of Osaka.

From Umeda I wanted to head to Osaka Castle and snap a few pics only to find it a little more complicated than it appreared. Like the SF Financial District, Northern Osaka and its skyscraper-addled square kilometers are fraught with one way streets, unclear signs and aggressive traffic. Doing SF cyclists proud (or disgracing law-abiding American nationals in Japan) I switched into full-on "SOMA bike messenger, move it!" mode and bombed through the gridlocked traffic, subsequently running many red lights, being yelled at by cops and meeting (and beating) real Japanese bike couriers. Chevette Washington ("Virtual Light". William Gibson. Read it!) would have been proud. What a hoot!

Too bad the castle was inundated by legions of festival goers for some crappy over-commercialized shell of a real matsuri, so I only stayed long enough to get some shots of the castle and ride the castle loop running/cycling trail, which was actually very very nice. And then the skies filled with clouds and it started raining. By that point though, after attacking Osaka traffic mercilessly, it was impossible to tell where the sweat ended and the rain soak began. After pulling into Nanba and Dotonbori, the true heart and soul of Osaka, I called in a little remote support to find another capsule hotel (Maia Z. power FTW!) and chucked my crap into another coffin before setting out for the late afternoon/evening. Tonight's target was the Sumiyoshi Summer festival and the site of my first "real" Japanese experience, but first a bizarre trip through the city's seedy, nerdy underbelly.

That's one handsome devil of a castle there.

Nipponbashi's Den Den Town is to Osaka like Akihabara is to Tokyo, except much smaller. I don't know, you just can't top Akihabara for concentrated insanity. Still, Den Den has all the essentials and with a grimy Osaka veneer to them: countless new and used computer parts stores; more anime outlets than a hot pocket-popping otaku can spend a week in; manga and model kit meccas; and miscellaneous storefronts where one can buy anything from power tools to porn to spy gear to nixie tubes in bulk. It was...impressive. Oh, and then there were the maid cafes. When I hung out with the hardcore otaku crowd at Chabot College in the late-90s I learned quickly that people who wear anime-themed costumes--especially the ladies in that social scene--are generally seriously disturbed mo-fos. So I had some trepidation riding around here just as the Friday evening rush to be in the company of lace and garter wearing women who were trying to look like 15-year-olds and gave them a wide berth. They say the kitchen knife is the weapon of choice for most Japanese murderers, well, who knows what those maids are packing inside their feather dusters...

I'm as puzzled by this as you might be. There were dudes doing hayashi music in the back while a rotating assortment of women got on stage and just went Flashdance, batshit crazy. Is this like a Japanese version of a revival meeting? Are they feeling the power of the hooooooooooly spirit?

Sumiyoshi is easy enough to get to from central Osaka, but I was tired and getting lazy so instead of riding I just went to Tennoji Park--what you might call the epicenter of Japan's teeming masses yearning to be free--and caught the southbound streetcar through Abeno and all the way to the gates of the shrine. You'd never believe it from looking at a map today that Osaka Bay used to come right up to the gates of Sumiyoshi Shrine and that the place was Japan's first international port. Your useless bit of Sumiyoshi trivia for the day. Well, the festival was as fantastic as I remember it, except for all the girls who think they're the cat's meow by wearing jinbei, but instead look like they're just about ready for a warm glass of milk and a bedtime story. They're for men and they look like PJs anywho so will you please get over this, women of Japan? Anyways, after two or three beers, some festival food, wandering around, watching the Official Festival Freakers (see picture please) and stalking people wearing funny Engrish shirts I caught a streetcar back to my bike and Nanba for a night out in Dotonbori.

The Osaka streetcar system are very much like the SF F-Line in that they run vintage single cars on light rail and the things sound like they'll fly apart if someone sneezes too hard. Naturally I think it's the only way to see Southern Osaka's neighborhoods.

Speaking of nights, I'm going to wrap this up here and finish the trip post tomorrow. I don't much remember starting a Picasa web album last year, but, well, there it was full of my pictures so I went and added all the good ones from this trip. Here you go!