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.

Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo Dome City and the failed Roppongi excursion

This post is a little late since we've been in Osaka for a night now, but I'm saving that for later. On Thursday, or last full day in Tokyo we went to observe the Shibuya Crossing in person and check out the Tokyo Dome.

By now we've pretty much mastered finding our way around Tokyo using the Tokyo Metro without relying too much on subway maps, so getting around is a breeze.  However this time we thought that the crossing was in Shinjuku, and that's where we headed initially. It doesn't help that we were on a Skype video call with some friends back home, so we were a little distracted. Once we made it to Shinjuku, however, we quickly realized our error and headed back on the train to Shibuya.

It would be too easy to compare Shibuya Crossing to Times Square in Manhattan. But even then, its something you would just have to see for yourself. We managed to catch the lunchtime rush and it just looked like a people valve broke and an ocean of heads rushed in to fill this giant 5-way intersection for three minutes. Imagine a giant toilet flushing, but instead of water swirling around, it's a shit-ton of people. The videos below don't really do it justice, but here anyways:

We decided to have lunch at an American-style restaurant just off the intersection. The food was decent, and it was really the first time for the whole trip we had a chance to pause and reflect on our vacation so far. 

We paid for our meal, then hopped the metro to visit Tokyo Dome City. Tokyo Dome City is a huge entertainment complex that has an amusement park, a spa resort, hotels and of course, the Tokyo Dome, home stadium of the local baseball team, the Yomiuri Giants.  When we got there the was probably the longest queue I've ever seen in real life. I believe all those folks were in line to either buy tickets or enter the stadium.

Next to the stadium is an amusement complex replete with all sorts of carnival rides, games and restaurants. The centerpieces are this HUGE roller coaster track that is affixed to and runs atop the roof of the complex, and an equally impressively sized ferris wheel, which I think is in the center of the coaster track. We took a walk around the complex, and found it oddly empty, given the overall attractiveness and scale of the park.  It didn't help that the coaster was down for maintenance, and we could see the workers toiling away at various points along the track. Even then, I decided I wasn't going to come all the way here and not go on at least one ride.  Rod decided he wasn't going to come all the way here and not have at least one snack.

Satisfied with out visit to the Dome, we headed back to our Chiyoda hotel a little earlier than normal with the intent of giving ourselves time to rest up and prepare for our first night on the town in Roppongi. We had heard good things about the Roppongi area as far as foreigner-friendly nightlife goes, and we were pretty excited about our chances with the local fauna.  We had dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant... and that was where we went wrong. My meal was fine, but the chicken stew that Rod had caused hitherto unforseen GI distress and made us abort our first nightlife experience. Which was fine, since we were coming back into Tokyo in about a week. But still, dammit Rod!

All things considered, it was a good day, and we were excited and well rested for our weekend stay in Osaka. And trust me, it would turn out to be an eventful weekend...

The Amazing Toilet Demonstration

Feel free to call us cavemen, troglodytes or whatever- this thing is awesome and worthy of further investigation/admiration.  Here, so you see it for yourselves:

The Imperial Palace Gardens, Sensoji Temple and Tokyo Skytree

Ohayou Gozaimasu, everyone! Or I guess since it's early evening on the US eastern seaboard as I write this, konbanwa! Yesterday was jam-packed with sightseeing, and in a lot of ways reinforced the opinion that freestyling this trip (ie, travelling without formal tour guides) was the best way to do this.

After our trip to Akihabara the previous day, we were pretty wiped out, mainly because we walked more or less non-stop for about 9 hours, except to stop for lunch or that one break for me to play SSF4. On this day, Rod and I were a little more determined to pace ourselves, just in case we wanted to go out later and see the Tokyo nightlife. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

We started the day with breakfast at our new favorite fast-food place a couple of blocks from our hotel. Don't get the wrong idea, this place serves ramen, and different entrees over rice and miso soup and salad with most all their entrees. Rod got the curry rice and almost died because it was so good, and I had some kinda pork dish with chicken katsu and rice with miso. And holy crap, it's cheap and GOOD.   We've been there everyday since we've been in Tokyo and it's saved us a lot of money:



So after that big breakfast, we plotted out our day and headed out on the tokyo Metro to visit the Imperial Palace Gardens. We didn't have to go too far since we can see a section of the gardens from our hotel, but damn that place is huge!  And beautiful.  The Gardens are basically to Tokyo what Central Park is to New York City. But then, it's much more than that, since it is a heritage site, and not just green space. We entered the gardens through the Otemon Gate and toured the east gardens:

Speaking for  myself and given the time of year, I was excited to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. It was a bit disappointing to see most of the cherry blossoms on the ground. No frolicking for me:


Or, actually, maybe a little frolicking:


We finished walking around the gardens decided to make our way over to Akasuka to visit Sensoji Temple. But before that we had to stop and get some lunch.  We decided that it was probably a good time to find a little hole in the wall ramen shop to beat our hunger, and we did!  The ramen was really good, and definitely better that the stuff we had in Akihabara the previous day:

Now, Sensoji Temple is arguably the most famous religious site in Japan and probably the center of Japanese Buddhist culture. So to some extent, we were prepared to see a large number of tourists and perhaps pilgrims at the gate of the Temple. However, the sheer number of both Japanese and foreign visitors to the site wrecked the shit out of all five of my senses. Not to mention the long bazaar of shops lining the path to the temple itself- it was clear that this was the place to get souvenir shopping done.


There were pastries, candy, kimonos, chopsticks, bandanas, toys, figurines, and even a few traditional weapons like swords and daggers on sale along the whole street, which ran for about 1/2 mile right up to the last gate to the temple. There were quite a number of small shops just off that main thoroughfare, and I even noticed a small ryokan or two.

Once we finally made it to the temple, we couldn't escape the sheer sense of scale and scope of the scene we were witnessing. There were huge number of schoolchildren there for some reason, I should mention, for no other reason that we noticed that they were there.  Rod and I each did a buddhist prayer and lit incense:


And proceeded up the temple steps to see the monks praying and performing a ceremony. We also each drew omikuji (well, I drew one, Rod drew a second after getting a bad fortune the first time):


Once we got our fill of Sensoji (sorry, Jesus!) we headed over to the Skytree, which was just a single train stop away.  The Skytree is the tallest structure in Japan and the tallest structure in the world.  It basically takes over from the famous Tokyo tower as the main broadcaster of terrestrial television signals in Japan.  Surrounding the Skytree is a huge mall which has what might be the biggest grocery store I have ever seen with my own eyes. We tried to get tickets to the observation deck (which were reasonably priced at around 2300 yen), but for some reason the deck was closed just before we arrived. We decided to take a load off and do some people watching, since our feet were tired and there were a lot of people who apparently wanted to be watched.


We picked up a couple snacks and made the relatively long trip back to our hotel in Chiyoda. We had a mind to try hitting up some of the nightlife later on, but after getting dinner (again at our favorite fast food joint) and grabbing some snacks and drinks at the corner store, we were pretty wiped out and were in no condition to do any kind of partying. So, that was it for the day. 

Akihabara and The Tokyo Metro Rail

What a long day! We spent the whole day in the Akihabara district today, which is popular for being the cultural and commercial center for consumer technology, gaming, anime and overall "otaku" or loosely, geek culture. We got there a little early via the Tokyo Metro, which is amazing! It's clean, efficient and quiet in both operation and atmosphere. Not unlike the airport yesterday, the metro was amazingly quiet in spite of the number of people riding the trains and bustling through the stations. Also, apparently 90% of Japanese working men wear a power suit to work. Anyways, I digress- once we got a little help in finding the english translation on the metro card dispensing machines, it was pretty easy to navigate the trains to go where we needed to go. Rod is damn good at reading subway maps, so he took the lead and we made our way to Akihabara from the hotel in about 20 minutes or so, including one transfer.

Like I said before, we arrived early. We thought that the place would be busy and bustling when we got there a little after 8am local time. Nope- the streets were pretty dead and employees were just arriving and businesses barely began to open their doors. It was fine though, since it gave us some time to supplement our breakfast at the hotel with something a bit more... recognizable. We stopped at a little cafe in the giant UDX building for some coffee and egg-bread, I think- it was basically an egg over-hard on top of half a slice of buttered toast.

We had a couple main items on our agenda in Akihabara. First, we had to get connected with the city wifi, and in addition obtain a wimax or 4G personal hotspot so that we could stay connected during the rest of our trip. We had gotten some information at the airport yesterday about where we could get a hold of the city wifi password for tourists, so we started our search looking for these places. We barely had any luck finding someone who spoke English! So for all you guys who told us that finding English speakers would be easy- a pox upon you! It was actually rather hard. Luckily, one guy on the street noticed that we were a little lost, and offered assistance. He took us to a giant 7 floor electronics store, and informed us, in English, that we could get what we were looking for there. After thanking him and parting ways, we went into the store and after some mining, found a helpful, and fairly fluent english speaking store clerk who helped us get a Wimax personal hotspot at a relatively cheap price for two weeks. We tested the device and it works like a dream!

Now that we were connected, we had to tackle the next thing- shopping. That would be a whole day process and, well to skip to the end, we turned up empty-handed. We literally searched high and low for an Inuyasha hooded sweater for Rod's little sister, but everywhere we went, it was either sold out or not available. In the process though, I was able to find a giant arcade in a building with the Sega logo on the side, and put in a couple rounds of Super Street Fighter 4, I played a couple rounds against the CPU and a couple rounds against live opponents. I lost versus the human opponents, but that's okay, that was the plan anyways. We're going to go back again at some point during this trip and I plan on redeeming myself, now that I know how the system here works.

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The whole day was pretty incredible. We saw a lot of what we expected to see. We saw the famous Gundam Cafe, the Maidreamin' Cafe maids on the street handing out flyers, the many, many stores selling toys, figures, comics, collectibles, video games, card games... it really was geek heaven, especially if you're there to buy as much crap as possible. We spotted a couple places where we could pick up some souvenirs, but after all the walking and broken communication with the locals, we were pretty drained. We headed to the train station, picked up some snacks, and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we're staying closer to home and checking out the Imperial Palace Gardens and visiting a couple of nearby shrines. Thanks, and check back soon for more updates to this post and later posts!

Hotel arrival and the toilet surprise

Landed!

So after roughly 27 hrs of total travel time, Rod and I finally made it to our hotel in Tokyo. Its almost startling that such a patchwork plan of flights, buses and cabs worked out so smoothly. Arrived early in Atlanta and LAX, cruised smoothly through security in both MIA and LAX. Honestly, the worst part of the trip was the fact that we had no WiFi on the LAX-Narita flight. We were sorta depending on that to sort out our immediate steps once we landed, and more than that was hoping to upload some videos and photos to the blog while in transit, but damn Singapore airlines! Besides that, the long leg was alright; no cabin fever or stir-craziness to report.  I had a nice conversation with an older Indian couple who lived in Montreal who were literally traveling around the world! They left from Montreal and were on their way to meet friends in Singapore for a 30-day cruise that would take them all the way from Singapore and end in Italy. I told Mrs. Patel that I want to do something similar one day, hopefully sooner than later.
 

 Once we landed, and the initial euphoria of getting off that giant subsonic aluminum tube, one of the first things we noted was just how damn quiet it was. EVERYWHERE. We were in the international arrivals area and we barely even detected any hushed whispers. Rod's billowy demeanor only made the misplaced serenity that much more apparent. The bus ride from the airport into Tokyo city was long, about 1.5 hours. The amazing thing we noticed next was just how clean the streets and highways are. I know this sounds like an exaggeration, but cot-damn if you can't eat off of it. When we transferred from the shuttle ("limousine") to the cab that took us to the hotel, it we couldn't help but be a little amazed at the spic 'n' span '92 Toyota Crown decked out in all sorts of meters, tracking hardware and billing software. And the car ran beautifully, like the cabbie just took it off the dealership.it didn't come close to feeling like we were in an old beater, even if it was just a short ride from the station to the airport. 

The hotel is pretty nice. We're staying at the Hotel Grand Arc Hanzomon, next to the Imperial Palace in the Chiyoda district. The room is up on the 14th floor and we have a decent view of the imperial gardens and a section of the Tokyo skyline. I took a video of the room and the night view, so look to see those later. And about the videos, I ran intoo some technical difficulty. But we have a few videos, but just can't upload them. I'll get them up eventually though. Anyways, its been a long-ass day, and tomorrow is shaping up to be fairly packed. I'm turning in. . look for another few posts tomorrow once we get properly connected. Later!