Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima - The Weekend Away from the Megalopolis

Ohayou Gozaimasu you gaijin monkeys!

We just arrived in Nagano from Osaka, and I realized I haven't shared anything of our weekend away from Tokyo! Osaka was basically our staging point to visit a few of the attractions on the western side of Honshu. Also, I had heard/read that Osaka was THE place to go to experience Japanese nightlife in it's purest form, so I figured, hey, why not make a weekend of it?

We arrived in Osaka just after 3 pm local time on Friday and took it easy for most of the afternoon. We figured we would rest up once we got there for our big night on the town. We did a little research and narrowed down our choices to just a few spots in an area of Osaka called Dotonbori which is basically the nightlife center of the city.  Each of the locations we chose were noted to be gaijin friendly so we could expect to get around and socialize without having to rely on our non-existent Japanese language skills.

We didn't really expect Dotonbori to be as seedy as it looked when we got there. It has the look and feel of the old strip in downtown Las Vegas, minus all the casinos. We had decided on a club called Pure in the heart of the district that was known to play hip-hop and R&B and tagged for it's foreigner-friendly clientele.

A thing about clubs in Osaka -  they all seem to be located in the basements of buildings. It kind of takes away from the atmosphere and the hype buildup when there's no street level indication of what's going on inside. Anyway, we were a little early to the club, and the DJ was playing a mix of old 90's hip hop and dance music. The crowd hadn't yet filled in, but it was obvious that the other early birds were club regulars and others staking out their surroundings before the rest of partiers came and filled in the void. One thing I forgot to note - cover here is expensive. At Pure, it was 3000 yen to get in, which is just over $30 USD by current exchange rates.  On the plus side, the cover, at least to Pure and the other club we went to later in the weekend (more on that later) included some drinks, Top shelf stuff and shots were usually extra, but we shied away from those.

As the night wore on, we met a guy from Australia named Billy. Billy happily engaged us in conversation and proudly stated that he was a regular here at Pure, because the liquor was cheap and the local Japanese girls were, and I'm paraphrasing here, easy. According to Billy, the girls at this club were here for one thing - foreign men. By the looks of things as the night wore on, it seemed that pretty much every other gaijin man in the whole city that and was stalking the grasslands.  We of course thought that we were going to be two of maybe three total black dudes in the club.

It felt like half the dudes in the club were black.

Also, it was a cockfest.

It was a black cockfest.

Ok, so that might be an exaggeration, but the ratio in the club, at the crowd's peak, was roughly 2.5 men to every one woman. the problem was that it felt like 1.5 of those men were gaijin, and 1 of those 1.5 were black, including us! So basically for every Japanese/Asian man in the crowd, there was exactly one black dude. You don't need to be a cultural anthropologist to know that in Japan and away from Tokyo especially, those are some really screwed up demographics, but hey- it's a hip-hop club, right?

The music, by the way, was awesome. Despite a couple of songs that were repeated, the DJ played a solid mix of old and new, hip hop and R&B, and reggae. It also was clear that the Japanese women there were really into gaijin.  We didn't have a problem dancing with and chatting up some attractive ladies before the competition arrived later on in the night, but once it was clear that the ratio was skewed, we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.

We got a late start the next day since we were up partying pretty late the night before. We had originally planned to use the day and go to Hiroshima and Miyajima to visit the Itsukushima Shrine (aka the Floating Shrine), but since those would take about 2 hours to get to from Osaka, we switched our itinerary around and headed to Kyoto to visit another famous shrine - the Fushimi-Inari-taisha.
Kyoto is only a brief 20-minute ride from Osaka via shinkansen so it was easy to travel there. It was cold and rainy that day, but we decided to make the best of it, of course.

The shrine is pretty amazing. First of all, it's huge, it's a major location for shinto worship, and it shows. The grounds are in prisitine condition and there is a huge 2 story gate right on the road that marks the entry path.  The place is also a photographer's dream location. As you walk up the steps and go deeper into the grounds, you're met with a path that is lined by, literally, thousands of smaller gates (or torii) that lead up the mountain and to various smaller sub-shrines. You could easily spend the whole day there walking the path and observing the torii and surroundings. We walked the paths for around a little over an hour just in amazement of the place.  It's definitely something to come see if you ever make it to Japan.

The rain and cold persisted into the night, so we pretty much aborted our plans to go out that night. It was definitely the right choice since we had a lot of ground to cover the next day. Especially since we got started a little late (almost and by an hour) then.

This was Sunday, and we would would cover the most ground today compared to all our other days in Japan. So being efficient with time was a must. Since we were running a bit late, we stopped and grabbed breakfast at McDonald's in the Shin-Osaka station before hopping on the Shinkansen to Hiroshima. Breakfast was good! The eggs were awesome and the sausage, egg and cheese biscuit I had was 10 times better than any I'd had in the States. It at least felt like I didn't cheat after I ate it.



We decided to go to Miyajima first, since that was the furthest away. We took the Shinkansen (about 2.5 hours) to Hiroshima, then boarded a local JR train for another 30 minutes to get to Miyajima. Once we got to our stop Miyajima, it was a short walk across the street to the ferry which took us across the water right to the shrine. Now, to be honest, the shrine, in and of itself, is not terribly impressive. The centerpiece is the single HUGE torii that sits off into the water and is a major landmark and one of the cultural symbols of the entire country. As for the shrine itself, its claim to fame is that, when the tide is high, it appears as though the structure is floating on the water. When we got there, the tide was low and rising slowly, so a little of the mystique was missing, but nonetheless it is an impressive location and is worthy of a visit on your own trip to Japan.



Yeah, and we finally saw some samurai/ninja shit. At trip to Japan without seeing some samurai/ninja shit is like traveling to Australia and not seeing a kangaroo.

One of the interesting thing about the island the shrine is located on are the tame deer that wander around on the streets. You can pet them and feed them at your own risk. We observed some of the deer being really aggressive with visitors, trying to work their muzzles into peoples handbags. One of them even tried to rummage through my backpack while it was on the ground as I was taking a picture.

We were able to walk around the streets just off the shrine's main entrance and eat some very nice desserts and pick up a couple of souvenirs. The shopping experience here was much more relaxed than the crazed market that was at Sensoji, so I was able to pick up a few cool items at a reasonable cost and with little stress - but not too much stuff, since we still had to make the trek to Horishima to visit the Atomic Bomb Dome Park and the Peace Museum.



Getting to Hiroshima wasn't too bad, but we had to skip lunch to make it there in time to be admitted to the museum (which has strictly ends admission at 17:30 before closing at 18:00). We barely made the cut-off time and somewhat had to rush our way through the exhibits, but the entire experience was... breathtaking.  The details of the events leading up to the atom bomb being dropped on Hiroshima are as vast as they are varied. They went into everything, including the Russo-Japanese War, the First and Second Sino-Japanese wars, the Manchurian Event, the attack on Pearl Harbour, and arguably most notable given the event, the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration which paved the way for the bombing of the city.  Most sobering though, was seeing and reading accounts of the devastating effects of the bomb on people and property. No detail is spared- on show there's actual twisted metal, melted rock and glass, concreted chipped and scarred by the force of debris that flew through the air with incredible velocity.

More ghastly however is the human toll of the bombing. There are charred pieces of clothing, a melted tricycle and helmet, partially vaporized shoes, watches that were stopped the instant (8:15am) the bomb detonated in the sky over the city. There were pictures of people who survived the bombs detonation- we were assaulted by fairly graphic images of people scarred and burned black by the intense heat of the explosion and actual keloids cut from the flesh of survivors, preserved in formaldehyde and put on display. There were more pictures of people scrounging to survive - we read the story of once man who was so thirsty at one point in the aftermath, he tried to survive by drinking the pus out of one of his badly burned limbs.  We read another story about a little girl who survived the blast intact -  no cuts, broken bones or burns- but contracted leukemia from the radiation poisoning mere weeks after the bomb and died a short 6 days later after after cancer aggressively attacked her body.

I could go on forever- and this is after only a short 45-minute walk through the entire museum and feeling like I'd only scraped the surface. The effects of nuclear war were made very real to me. That one single atom bomb could literally vaporize and entire city of 300,000 and kill almost a third of the populace upon impact, then kill another third in the aftermath with radiation, fires, and starvation is... scary.  Even scarier is that there are nuclear weapons that exist right now that are 1,000 time more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima is... honestly, I don't have the words. That we have this crazy fat baby in the DPRK waving those things around like green army men is infuriating. Maybe someone needs to take his ass to Hiroshima and show him the effects of the thing he's playing with so carelessly and arrogantly.





Okay, off the soapbox.

We wrapped up a sobering visit to the memorial and made the long trip back to Osaka.  Rod and I decided not to give up on the Osaka nightlife, so after cleaning up and having dinner, we made a trip to another nightclub a little way from the frantic scene in Dotonbori, called G2.  Now we had no idea, but G2 is a electronica/trance nightclub with, of course, a big cover charge.  What the hell, we thought, we're on vacation- so we paid cover and went inside and it was exactly what you'd expect: blacklights, fluorescent paintings, and people dancing nonstop. Rod was none too enthused, but I decided to make what I could of it.  I danced a little and chatted with some of the folks in the club, who were really friendly and welcoming. Generally, the english spoken by the patronage wasn't as good as at Pure the previous, night, but that was to be expected and I felt kinda shitty for not knowing more Japanese.  In any case, our appetite for nightlife in Osaka was satiated, and we headed to Dotonbori to eat a late snack then went back to our hotel. The next day (Monday), we would drag our luggage with us (we had our luggage sent to Osaka when we left Tokyo) for close to four hours to make the trip to Nagano, the city most famous for being the home of the 1998 Winter Olympics.