Two weeks ago today, actually, at the time of this writing. I’ll talk about it later, but basically it was a busy week in the Kansai area, followed by getting the sickest I’ve been in about a year. Finally, that’s all behind me.

So on Sunday, I woke up, had some breakfast with Okiko and her son, and made off to Osaka.

Overall, a really quick trip. The cool thing about being a foreigner is that whole “Japan Rail Pass” thing that you can get, where for about $280 you can travel anywhere you want on any train you want, including Shinkansen/bullet trains (except for “Nozomi” trains. But they’d never know anyway). Anyway, it’s about an hour by normal train from Kobe to Osaka, or approximately 15 minutes by bullet train.

In Osaka, I met up with a friend (Kamiya Ryo, the dude who wrote the Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake, among other games) at Namba, which is pretty much the center of Osaka: It’s kind of the sprawling commercial metroplex that’s become the de-facto cultural center of the city. He took me over to a kushiyaki restaurant, a place where they basically deep-fry (tempura style) anything on a stick. I had hard-boiled eggs, asparagus, chicken, beef with onion, konnyaku (kinda like gelatin), mochi, and all sorts of bizarre things in a unique werstoshire glaze. Pretty good overall.

After that, we wandered around a bit, including to Nihonbashi, which is like a “Mini-Akihabara”. The only difference is that in Akihabara all the adult video stores are underground or hard-to-find, in Osaka there’ll be an electronic store and a manga store sandwiching an adult video store that has life-sized posters of AV models sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the store. Kind of an interesting thing, selling porn like it was just vegetables or fish, but I’m told that this is a thing that’s unique to Osaka (”no shame”). Apparently the latest AV release was “Hitomi Tanaka”, a gravure model who made her way over to the porn industry, to the delight of horndogs across the planet. They had a life-sized poster/stand of her in the front of the store.

Over in the otaku areas was something interesting that I didn’t see in Akiba: There is a parking spot right near the shopping area, and it was filled with cars of otaku, who basically not only souped up their cars hashiriya/ricer style, but who also plastered cheesy anime figures all over their car as well. Like, instead of racing for “Gatorade” or “Ny-Quil”, they’re racing for “Princess Panty-Shot”. I figured Matt G would get a kick out of these.


So I spent about 4 hours talking to Kamiya, which was really interesting language-wise. Basically, he was raised in Osaka but now lives in Wakayama. Which means that he’s got a pretty outrageous Osaka accent. Normally I’m totally ok with Osaka accents, but for four hours of talking on fringe topics in a frenzied pace… really can take a toll. By the end of the day, my eyes were rolling in the back of my head with exhaustion, almost like when I do interpretation work.

Anyway, it was a fun time, althought I didn’t get a chance to make my way to the port (I like some of those areas of Osaka, like the “full biosphere” aquariums they have there.

That night, I headed back to Kobe and we all went out for dinner. We went to a pretty awesome Hokkaido-themed sushi place (a sit-down family style kaitenzushi), where we ate and ate and ate and ate… I’m not exactly sure what happened, but we paid the bill, drove away, and realized at some point that they must have calculated the plates wrong. I love sushi, but it’s expensive in the US so I always order Something Else Plus Some Sushi: I never make a meal out of sushi. Here, I made a meal out of sushi, and so did everyone else, and the bill ended up coming out to something like $7.50 per person. Huh.

Back at Okiko’s, I played around with Minato some. Cute kid, but deep in those Terrible Twos (”Ma no nisai”, almost the same in Japanese interestingly enough).


The next day we headed out to Kyoto, just Orie and I.