Trip to Osaka

During the autumn festival in China, aka Red October, is the perfect time to take a longer vacation once more to Japan. I’ve never developed the stomach for moon cake and with many places in China closing for the week it’s the perfect time to go abroad. It isn’t that I’m madly in love with Japan, just extremely fond of the place. The main reason I had chosen to visit twice within six months is it’s the place I find most interesting within a direct flight. I dreamt of visiting Russia and even working there, but they have bigger problems at the moment and the European end looks more fun, in more peaceful times. North Korea is just over the horizon from Dalian but I can safely assume it lacks Japan’s entertainment. I’m sure to visit South Korea one day, only after I’ve seen more of Japan.

Flying from China this time of year can be very expensive due to the amount of travel during the holiday. It’s second only to Chinese New Year for expense. So I booked the flight and hotel not long after my Tokyo trip in May. It’s to be the longest time I’ve been away from China in the nearly five years I’ve been there. Also the first time I’ve ever had two vacations in the same year. The benefits of not struggling to make ends meet in the British Gig Economy.

Flight to Kansai Airport

I flew with Spring Airlines this time. It was a good price because I booked early, cheap but a little cramped. The pain in my shoulders from being wedged has almost fixed itself. Luckily the typhoon that was heading for Osaka the week before devolved into a wet fart, so there weren’t any storms for the pilot to dodge. The landing into KIX was a little frightening, after the journey down gave us some beautiful scenery. The parts of Japan I saw from the window looked like Scotland, but made of islands and well planned out gray cities. The airport must have been built on reclaimed land a distance from the coast. The plane was flying low over the sea for what felt like three anxious minutes, with the wheels down and cockpit buzzers buzzing. With only the side window view of the sea inches below it was a relief when the square edge of the runway came into view and the wheels touched down an instant later.

I brought a paperclip with me this time to get another Japanese SIM card into my phone. Last time the poking stick that came with the SIM from an airport vending machine broke off leaving me stuck. This time I’m able to use Google Maps, which is banned in China, to plot a course to the hotel. The hotel was so far from Kansai KIX Airport it would have taken the same amount of time to get there from Kobe. The better option of the three nearby airports would have been the actual Osaka Airport. It takes a mix of train and metro to get to the hotel. It’s not easy at first to figure out how to get a ticket and which one to get, or which of the many platforms for various lines to go to. Figuring out the public transport system in a Japanese metropolis takes a certain amount of autism and I’m not sure if I have too much or not enough. In the end it’s very similar to Tokyo’s system. Also very clean, running like clockwork and affordable.

Osaka Castle’s Moats

Castles are a beautiful commonality between Japan and England. My hometown of Durham has a castle accompanying a much grander cathedral. China has a lack of such things for some reason. The most fascinating part of Osaka Castle for me isn’t the castle itself within the centre but the system of moats that encircle the central castle. The size of the stones that make the walls of the moats must have ancient astronaut theorists doubting mankind could’ve ever built something so bold. The moat walls are huge structures and beautiful in their scale. They fit together at perfect angles. Some of the series of overlapping moats have lakes where you can take a tour on a boat. Other moats are like jungles thick with greenery. It looks plump enough to jump in and spring back up to the ledge, I’m not suggesting anyone tries this. There is no fee to see the moats but there is a fee to take a look-see inside Osaka Castle within the centre of the moats. I don’t know how much it costs, I was so impressed by the moats that the castle looked secondary in splendour, and with it being a red hot day I didn’t feel like joining the queue. 

Denden Town

Denden is Osaka’s Akihabara, where earlier this year I bought a Nintendo 64 and needed more games. The game I was looking for is Perfect Dark and it proved hard to find, but it was good fun hunting it down. There’s an endless amount of Pokemon card shops. Got to wonder if there are really any rare ones at all with the amount of them on show. Luckily I’m slightly too old to have gotten into collecting those. My childhood collectables were the Merlin’s Premier League stickers predating Pokemon by a few years. I found a few arcades with retro games. The price of a turn is surprisingly cheap. I’m bad at maths but I’m sure 100 Yen is about 5 Chinese RMB, which in British pounds is peanuts. I couldn’t find my favourites from Akihabara, Lucky ‘n’ Wild or Daytona USA, and started to consider a day trip to Tokyo just to play them. Finding Nintendo 64 games was harder than I thought. Shops were full of much older Nintendo games and consoles, all of which I would love to buy if I had the space. It’s also very hard to find Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) stuff in Japan. It’s like it never existed here. I eventually found Perfect Dark and a 90s F1 game. 

It’s been a long time since I played a new game. Anything recent I’ve played has needed constant downloadable updates and the game to be uploaded, even with a disc. Waiting for my Playstation 4 to download its repairs and updates can take as long as my old 80s Commodore took to upload a cassette game. These retro cartridge games from the 90s are superior. No updates, they made the games right the first time. Plug it in and play. Perfect.

Kobe

Much like my previous visit to Japan, I hadn't planned out in any detail what to do in my time in Osaka. I think if I ever take a beach holiday it would be fine to just remain on that beach, but when visiting one of the world’s great cities with other interesting cities and points of interest just hours away by train, it’s impossible not to go and explore. 

When visiting any city for just a few hours it’s impossible to fully experience the place. This was just a quick look and see, and in blazing late summer heat. Getting to Kobe from Osaka is extremely easy by train. The prices are affordable, at least compared to England. In the few hours I’d given myself to experience Kobe on a whim the best thing I could do was to eat some of Kobe’s famous steak. The amount of steak houses was overwhelming but due to the unseasonal heat I quickly chose a steakhouse. I could eat steak every day if it wasn’t hard to find in China. I can find it in Chinese supermarkets but for the life of me haven’t mastered cooking it. With the amount of steakhouses on offer in Kobe I could happily spend a week here doing nothing else but eat steak.

Hiroshima

With a growing collection of Starbucks mugs from Japanese cities, one from Hiroshima was necessary when I realised it was much closer to Osaka than Tokyo is. It’s an eerie feeling to visit one of the two cities in the world that had been destroyed by nuclear weapons. At the time of writing. My girlfriend and I wouldn’t be surprised if round three started anytime soon. The best we can do to prepare while living in China is to practise archery and play the Fallout games, which I showed her after she showed me the TV series. It was a surreal vibe to be sitting in a Hiroshima Starbucks listening to that 1950s jazzy lounge music that’s also familiar to both the Fallout games and TV series. Fallout being about surviving in a bleak future post nuclear war.

I walked from the train station to the famous site where the bomb detonated. The sun was blazing hot again on this late summer’s day. I had to use my umbrella for shade before I passed out. But at least the temperature was far from the record high. I always thought it was a church beneath where the bomb detonated, but it was actually a conference centre. By the bank of the river with the three-way bridge the bombers were aiming for. The conference centre is now named the A-Bomb Dome and partly survived because the bomb was directly above. It’s another surreal feeling to see tram stations and bus stops around and about named in relation to the site of a nuclear bomb blast. Few cities can ever boast of such a monument.  One of few surviving buildings nearby is what was a bank made from heavy blocks of stone.

It’s amazing to see a beautiful and functioning city having been long since rebuilt here. It’s concerning that modern nuclear weapons are exponentially more powerful than the one used here. It takes huge amounts of intelligence to make a weapon so retarded. Like killing millions of innocent wasn’t enough, now if modern nuclear weapons are used the ground has to be made uninhabitable for a thousand years and the sky filled with radioactive ash.

I love and respect the Japanese people. Their calmness and kindness. The consideration they have for each other. It has to be obvious I was a tourist in this city and I wasn’t there for the Mazda car museum. Yet I didn’t feel any ill feeling towards me from the locals. 

I was going to risk writing a funny piece on how English natives might react to tourists visiting an English city close to 80 years after a nuclear bomb attack, but as I write the English government is insistent on antagonising Russia. So I’ll not tempt fate. It involved hordes of feral ghouls on stolen bikes trying to steal anything that hadn’t yet been stolen. Nothing had been repaired or worked since the bomb in this scenario, gangs of raiders attack anything that moves with a knife and the police are existent. Basically how things are in present day England. 

Cash Rather Than Cashless

It’s a buzz to give the exact change in cash and coins. Some convenient apps I’m now used to from living in China can’t provide the same feeling. Also, compared to England, it’s another good feeling about being in Japan that the chances of my wallet being stolen are slim and none.

The exchange rate is easy to estimate from Japanese Yen to Chinese Yuan. Take the zero of the end and half it. It’s a reliable method to convert it to the Chinese currency I’m now used to. Then take another zero off to get an estimate in British Pounds. I found myself spending no more than I would’ve had had I been in China doing something usual. Perhaps it’s too easy to overspend with cashless money apps. Using real paper and metal money feels like a better idea. There’s national identity in the banknotes each country uses (maybe not the Euro) and it’s a sign of a respectful civilization if you can have your wallet on you without fear of pickpockets or a couple of guys on a scooter holding you at knifepoint.

Attempts at learning Japanese and Chinese

It’s been five years since I left England for China and I still can’t string a sentence together in Chinese. It might be because I’ve lived in Dalian for most of those years where the accent is thick. The equivalent of trying to learn English in Newcastle or Glasgow. The years of the ‘in between times’, or whatever we are globally calling what 2020-2022 was, hindered progress. But it’s strange that in ten days in Japan I’d made more progress with Japanese than I had with Chinese despite living there for years. I think the necessity to get the Chinese tones perfect hindered my progress, although it’s possible to be understood with the wrong tones if the sentence is long enough. While in Japan I made it to Duolingo’s Diamond League, rather than actually talk much. It’s fun to try and decipher both Japanese and Chinese writing like it’s Egyptian hieroglyphs. Perhaps I would progress much faster in both languages if I just took a risk in trying to speak it.