Sunday in Osaka

We adventure out of Kyoto and into Osaka today, which is only a 30-minutes JR ride. From the JR Osaka subway station, we hop onto the local subway to Osaka Castle, the city’s main historical attraction. When we walk out of the station, we see women scattered around holding signs. We approach Osaka-jo Hall & see hoards of women lined up. A shopkeeper explains that the women with signs are requesting tickets for today’s concert, starring a Chinese band & another called Toshinki. As we pass Osaka-jo Hall, we gawk at the sheer number of women of all ages patiently waiting for this boy-band’s concert. We find the band’s big rigs planted behind the hall - each rig has a large headshot of each band member.

The grounds of Osaka Castle are very impressive, one of the most impressive historical site we’ve visited. It takes a 7-minute stroll to get from the wide outer moat to a wide inner moat. The in-between space has been turned into a park with shopkeepers, live performers, & dog walkers. One dog walker, an eccentric elderly man, walks two small white dogs with dyed hair; one has florescent pink ears & tail, the other florescent green. Each dog wears a tiny kimono. In an empty parking lot, we see a group of teenagers practice a pop dancing routine and a man race his remote-controlled motorcycle in circles.

The castle is surrounded by artistically designed stone walls. Some surfaces are wide slabs of flat stone. The castle is small, but it is elevated by the stone walls, so it looks huge & distant. The interior has been turned into a museum, so we have 8 floors to explore. Oddly enough, the six floor is missing. Each floor holds artifacts that lay out the history of rulers in Japan, including the creator of the castle, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was the first to unify Japan. Surprisingly, many displays have English translations.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was defeated by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the same paranoid shogun who built Nijo Castle in Kyoto with its nightingale (creaking) floors & hiding places for his bodyguards. Tokugawa Ieyasu foretold that his battle for Osaka Castle would take only three days, & he predicted correctly. The great battle is called Summer of Osaka, & the most valuable piece in the castle is a large, 6-paneled painting on the battle & its aftermath. At first glance, the painting reminds me of Where’s Waldo?, whereas it reminds Robby of his Nintendo DS game Advanced Wars: Dual Strike (he became addicted to it during our honeymoon in Turkey, & he has brought it with him again to Japan). Group of tiny soldiers are depicted attacking one another, & they are represented by their flags. Toyotomi’s troops carry red flags & a golden gourd while Tokugawa’s troops carry red flags. Famous generals can be sighted in this painting, & one entire floor of the museum is dedicated to identifying & explaining the known participants in the battle. Osaka Castle is painted in it too, & behind its little windows are the faces of crying women. It’s a breathtaking detailed piece of work that no postcard could do justice.

Upon leaving the castle, we see an artist stationed in the park who is drawing caricatures of a couple. He draws them manga style, & his work is well done. His sign posts, “10-15 minutes, couple 1600 yen.” So we stand and wait because he seems to be well into their portraits. 5 minutes becomes 10, which becomes 15, then 20. He doesn’t acknowledge our presence, &, as an afterthought, we should have interrupted him & spoken with him. We get frustrated waiting & waiting & end up leaving after 20 minutes. We realize that perhaps he didn’t want to draw us in the first place, so he took his time with his current couple to avoid us. That pisses me off even more. Oh well, lesson learned. If we had communicated first, we could have avoided our long wait.

We go to the Hep Five shopping center near the Osaka JR station in order to explore the Sega Amusement Park, which is located on the 8th & 9th floors. The shopping mall is enormous with shops mostly for women. Osaka’s women are as fashionable as Tokyo’s. There are many primped women patrolling the streets, though fewer & less extreme than Tokyo. It’s frightening for me to see them wobble around in heeled shoes all day. They look like beginning ice skaters whose feet either lean inward or outward.

A part of the 9th floor of the amusement park is occupied by Studio Sega, a slew of photobooths. The place is packed with small groups of girls, who pay outside, go into the booth for their pictures, then stand outside the booth to scan their photos into their cell phones or have them printed. I think there is some sort of photoshopping or cheesecloth effect done to the photos because, as we sneak glances of the girls’ shoulders, the results are prettier than the real deal. No wonder the girls love these booths - they offer perfected images of them. The 9th floor also contains many coin toss games, where you toss a 100-yen coin into a machine that pushes one layer of coins onto the second layer. Your goal is to toss so many that coins from the first layer will be pushed off the ledge & out of the machines. We have these machines in the states too, but these are more complex. People think that they need skill to succeed at this game by strategically tossing the coins in certain places, but it’s all a game of chance. We also find a few virtual rides, like a water rafting very much like Star Tours at Disneyland, except the riders are sprayed by waves & mist.

After the overstimulation of the arcade games, we head back to Osaka Station & have dinner at an underground eating establishment full of cheap-eats. We have yakisoba & a flour & cabbage pancake called okonomiyaki. Not bad. Then we go back to Kyoto for the night.