Nana (Osaka)

Thursday 9th/Friday 10th July 2015

Accommodation: Hotel Le Botejour Nanba, booked through hotels.com for £89 for two nights for a double room.

Back to the big city

After spending a wonderful, relaxing night in Koyasan, listening to the rain fall in the temple gardens, we headed back to civilisation and to Japan’s third most populated city – Osaka!

Using our return ‘Koyasan-World heritage ticket’, we got the bus, cable car and train from Koyasan to Osaka and hopped on the Metro to Nipponbashi station, once again wishing we weren’t lugging a stupidly heavy suitcase all over Japan. And, once again, we came out of one of the Metro station exits and were lost! We flagged down a very helpful man (who spoke English) who didn’t know where our hotel was, but tried his best to help us find it. He sent us in the right general direction and then we asked a few shops and eventually stumbled across the hotel, recognising it from the picture on hotels.com.

We booked an economy double room and it was the most disappointing place that we stayed during our trip. It wasn’t awful but the room had a tiny window looking right onto a wall so there was no natural light. There was also a comically small bathroom (which we had expected in Japan) and there was only wifi in the lobby – surprisingly in a big city after we’d had wifi in our temple room in Koyasan the night before!

 

After dumping our bags, our first stop was to find food. We headed back towards Nipponbashi Station and found a ramen place with a machine to buy tickets. I went for ‘dipping noodles’, not really knowing what to expect. I was served a massive bowl of cold noodles, with a bowl of sauce on the side. The man serving didn’t speak English but demonstrated that I should dip the noodles into the sauce and eat them and they were very tasty! He also offered me a fork, which I declined and used my chopsticks like a pro!

Experiencing Japanese baseball – Hanshin Tigers

Next up was the activity in Osaka that we were most excited about – baseball! I’m not a massive sports fan but like baseball because of all the activities going on alongside the game and we’d heard that Japanese baseball fans were like no other!

We had bought tickets to see the Hanshin Tigers in March through buysumotickets.com. We went for the middle priced tickets which cost us ¥9,400 (about £57) for two tickets including service charge and postage to the UK. We also used buysumotickets.com to buy our tickets to sumo wrestling in Nagoya and would recommend them. The Hanshin Tigers play at Hanshin Koshien Stadium, near Kobe in Hyoga. It was easy to get to by train and took us just under an hour.

When we got off the train, we followed the sea of fans wearing yellow towards the stadium, stopping off at the shop to buy ourselves some t-shirt so that we could pass as true Hanshin Tigers fans! The baseball was a fantastic experience! The fans are amazing (pretty much entirely Japanese apart from David and I!) and the atmosphere was incredible. They had a different song for each player that went up to bat, which the whole crowd would sing with musical accompaniment from people in the crowd playing trumpets etc. There were rocket balloons for sale and at one point everyone inflated these and let them off into the sky.

There was a great selection of food and drinks on sale (including sushi of course!) in the food court area and there were ‘Asahi girls’ walking about selling beer from packs on their back. Hanshin Tigers won the game which made the whole night even better!

After the game, we headed back to Osaka…along with almost everyone else. It took quite a while to get to the train, slowly walking along in a herd of people and then the trains were super busy. We spoke to a few Hanshin Tigers fans on the way back and a few girls stopped David (wearing his new Tigers t-shirt) in the metro station to shake his hand! We wandered from the Metro station back to our hotel to make our plan for exploring Osaka the next day.

Samurai swords and sashimi

Unlike Kyoto, where we had a list of ‘must see’ places, our full day in Osaka was a lot more relaxed. We mainly wanted to see the bright likes of Dōtonbori at night so the daytime was quite chilled. We headed towards the Tempozan Ferris Wheel, which was located beside a small mall called Tempozan Market Place. It’s also right beside Osaka Aquarium and Legoland but we decided against visiting either. We went into the mall in the search of food and found a nice little conveyor belt sushi place. It was really quiet but the food was fresh as they made it to order and sent it out on the belt. As with the fantastic sushi place in Tokyo, there was a little screen beside our table (which luckily translated to English) where we could browse through the menu and order. We got lots of delicious sushi and a big bowl of salmon sashimi which was fab.

After lunch, we had a wander around the mall. There were some good shops for picking up souvenirs, like a ¥100 shop, which I got a little carried away in. David also found himself a samurai sword shop and, after a lot of weighing up the chances of actually getting it back to Scotland, decided to buy one. It was unsharpened metal, which hopefully customs would understand… The company will post them back to your country for you but said they didn’t post to the UK as it was unlikely to make it back. We were now destined to carry a replica samurai sword for the rest of our trip. At least David was trained to use it after our Samurai lesson in Kyoto a few days earlier!

Tempozan Ferris Wheel

After the mall we went on the Tempozan Ferris Wheel. At 112.5m in height, it was the world’s biggest ferris wheel until the London Eye was built. Tickets were pretty reasonable at ¥8oo (about £5) each and there was only a very short queue, unless you decide to wait for one of the few glass bottom cars. The cycle takes about 15 minutes and, as it wasn’t raining (for once!), we got some nice views across Osaka and the harbour.

Osaka’s okonomiyaki

We headed back to the Nipponbashi area where our hotel was and looked for somewhere for dinner. We had heard that Osaka was famous for okonomiyaki, which was described as a savoury pancake so decided to find somewhere to try it. Luckily, TripAdvisor pointed us in the direction of an okonomiyaki restaurant that was just around the corner from us and had good reviews. We put our name down on the list by the door and waited for about 30 minutes for a table, while sharing the English menu with some other tourists. The restaurant has the chefs in the middle and people sit around the sides in front of a hot plate where the food is served. It was great to be able to watch the chefs at work while we were waiting.

We both ordered the okonomiyaki with seafood which included squid, prawns, scallop and lobster. They were really delicious and we loved having them served to us on the hot plates to cut up with a little spatula.

The restaurant is called Fukutaro, which you can find on TripAdvisor. The sign on the front is in Japanese characters so not easy to spot without using the map on TripAdvisor. During our entire trip around Japan, this was the only place that I didn’t manage to avoid the traditional squat toilets! However, the set up of the bathroom meant that I could use it like a normal toilet using a kind of hover approach…

Dōtonbori

After dinner, our plan was to head to the Dōtonbori area and check out the bright lights of Osaka. Looking at a map, we were happy to discover we were just a short walk from the area and headed in the direction. It was Friday night and the city was buzzing. We walked along the long, pedestrian walkway which was covered by a glass roof and passed by shops, restaurants, fast food places, bars and arcades. According to Google maps, the walk is only about five minutes from our hotel but it took much longer after being distracted by arcades on the way.

We came out of the covered walkway and knew we’d hit the right area when we saw the giant, neon crab sign that I’d seen in guidebooks.

There was a canal running through the area and, from a bridge over it, you could see the huge Glico Running Man sign. We’d been to Shibuya in Tokyo a few nights before and think that Dōtonbori was brighter than this, with loads of huge neon adverts. It was really busy with tourists and there were lots of people posing in front of the Running Man sign getting their pictures taken. I’m not really sure if there’s much significance for the Running Man or crab sign but I recognised them both to be the ‘Osaka’ that I’d seen in guidebooks!

Space Station Osaka

David had found a video bar called Space Station on TripAdvisor, which promised lots of retro video games so we headed there after Dōtonbori. It was a short walk, through a slightly seedy area with quite classy looking hotels offering prostitutes on the signs outside. It didn’t feel unsafe at all (I don’t think we felt unsafe at any point during our trip to Japan) but I guess it’s one of the dodgier areas of Osaka.

Space Station is a little bar, upstairs in a building, which has loads of different consoles dotted about that you can sit and play while you drink. I’ve only ever had any sort of attention span for retro Sonic (none of your 3D lark) and Tetris so I played them, while David played Street Fighter, TMNT and challenged some people to Mario Kart. We stayed for a few hours and the majority of people who came in weren’t Japanese. The girl working behind the bar was really friendly and I think from England (I’m not sure it was England but she’d definitely been to Edinburgh).

After David had beaten everyone at Mario Kart and was suitably merry, we attempted the short walk back to our hotel, got very lost and found it eventually. There was a Cup Noodle vending machine in the hotel so we tucked into those before heading up to bed.

I really enjoyed our couple of days in Osaka (especially the baseball and okonomiyaki!) but I don’t think it would be on my list of places to go back to. I’m sure that there were a lot of sites that we missed out on but I didn’t feel that it was as much of a ‘must see’ city as the likes of Kyoto.

(And we did manage to get the Samurai sword back into the UK, after lots of questions from police at the airport in Tokyo…)