September 11, Osaka
Sun 11 Sep 2011 by mskala Tags used: travelAs I sit down to start writing this, it is 8:40pm in Osaka, which is where I am right now. But it's 7:40am in Waterloo, which is where I was at this time ten years ago. I had just arrived a few days earlier in the city where I planned to live for four years while I did my PhD. I'm not sure where I thought I'd be today. If you told me then that on this day in 2011 I'd be writing this from Osaka, that in itself wouldn't have surprised me - it was certainly my expectation that the kind of work I would do would involve occasional travel of this nature. If you told me I'd have finished my PhD by now, I'd have said, of course, that's the plan. If you told me I'd only be three years out of the PhD, having taken seven instead of four to complete it, and in 2011 I'd still be doing "postdocs," that part would have surprised me; it sure wasn't the plan. And neither was still being alone in 2011. Indeed, very much of my life as of this day ten years ago was carefully planned around the fact that my top priority was to not still be alone after even one more year. My plan for my life had already failed because I was still alone in 2001. And my last chance to salvage it, in the early 2000s, failed too.
But just a couple hours from now my ten-years-younger self will (if I can use the future tense for what happened a decade ago) find something else to think about for a while. I found out about the historic events of September 11 sooner than most people around me did because shortly after the first plane struck I tuned into a "talker" MUD where people were discussing it, including one member who was in downtown New York and actually seeing the events first-hand. At the time I found out, I was in a small computer lab on one of the upper floors of the Math and Computer Science building at Waterloo, because I had only just had my computer account activated, I had no computer in my office yet and I didn't yet have my home computer linked to the Net, and so that was where I had to go to get on the Net at all. I remember turning away from the computer and addressing the only other person in the lab: "Listen, there's something important you should probably know about." I told him what I'd just read, and then I went down to the pay phones in the Davis Centre atrium and phoned my parents on the West Coast, even though it was 6:something am for them.
Now it is ten years later, and as of yesterday about 5pm, I went off-duty. Except for a brief academic meeting while I'm in Tokyo, the rest of this trip is my own time. I begged off on the group dinner some MCFG+2 participants were organizing, because I wanted to do some laundry in the hotel coin-op machines. In fact, I maybe should have waited, because I've got better laundry access here in Osaka, but whatever. It may actually be just as well because being on my own for dinner meant I got to spend some time wandering the shopping area of Nara at night, and I got to pick my own place to go for dinner (which meant I got to go lower-end, as I often prefer - in this case a Japanese curry house - rather than the "fine dining" favoured by most of the people from the conference).
I had budgeted the day, with no other plans, for getting from Nara to Osaka. In fact, it's less than an hour on the train (maybe a little more than an hour when you count the waits for connecting trains), so I had some extra time. I aimed to leave Nara pretty early, on the theory that Osaka would be a more interesting place to spend the majority of the day. Honestly, although I have nothing exactly against Nara, it was only on my itinerary at all because that's where the work that pays the bills sent me. Nara wasn't really on my list of places I wanted to visit in Japan. So, I ended up in Osaka at maybe 9:30am today.
That presented a bit of an issue because I couldn't check into my hotel until 2pm. Fortunately, large luggage lockers were a lot easier to find in the station where I ended up dropping my bag (Tennouji) than they had been in Shinjuku. The first place I went was Abeno Seimei Jinja, which marks the supposed birthplace of Abeno Seimei, a famous practitioner of the ancient mystical system called onmyoudou. I don't know a lot about onmyoudou - it seems that nobody today really does - but what I've read about it sounds a whole lot like Chinese feng shui with more of an emphasis on magical spells and less on interior decorating, crossed with astrology and Ceremonial Magick. So, yeah, I basically went to the shrine of Heien Period Aliester Crowley. Abeno Seimei has been used as a character in several works of pop culture; the one I'm familiar with is Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, in which he is the mystery man pursued through time and space by Miss Mune-Mune.
Pursued through time and space by busty redheaded meganekko is pretty good already, of course, but the fact that people who should know better have chosen to read "occultist" as "early scientist" and have blown up Abeno Seimei into a patron of the sciences, made this an appealing destination for me. To get there I had to take the Abeno Line tramway, which was a little tricky because the tram conductors didn't really speak English and I didn't really understand their Japanese, which made it hard for them to explain to me that I couldn't buy a ticket, the routine was to just get on, and then pay 200円 to the driver when I got off (same fare to anywhere), but I made it to the right station, and found the shrine with only a little bit of random walking. The neighbourhood it was in was very picturesque, too, and the shrine was one of the nicest I've been to so far. It's clearly well-maintained and active, but at the same time it's not all touristed to death like Kasuga Taisha.
On my return from that, it was still well before noon. I spent some time wandering around in the mall near the station, which was kind of fun even though malls are not really my thing. I looked at some very nice art and craft supplies. The Abenobashi Shopping Arcade from the anime does not really exist; but I figure that this mall is its spiritual equivalent. Check my photos for the Million God slot-machine ad.
The Tennouji station has an exciting array of vending machines selling all sorts of things. I ate lunch in a restaurant there, experimented with the machines, sat on a little-used platform listening to my audio player for a while, and spent some time wandering around looking at girls. I'm still trying to pin down the causative factors here, but it's been quite noticeable to me that pretty girls are a lot more plentiful here than in Nara. Maybe it's the big-city factor; maybe it's that most of the girls I saw in Nara were with school groups, and thus both younger than I'd prefer and in uniform (and real school uniforms are not much like the ones in anime); or maybe there's something specific to Osaka in particular. I'll have to look more carefully when I get back to Tokyo, and do a comparison.
Eventually it was late enough that I could check into my hotel, so I went there and did. This is the Fraser Residence Nankai Osaka, and it's quite a posh place. A combination of getting a discount online, wanting to be in an easy-to-find location and in a hotel that could handle English speakers, and eventually saying "Heck with it, I don't want to spend more time looking," meant I reserved a fair bit higher base-price room than I would have otherwise chosen. The facility is a little odd in that it seems to be primarily intended for people staying a longer time - this is really more properly a furnished apartment, not a hotel room as such - but they nonetheless accepted a reservation for three nights, and it was well reviewed in the places I looked, and here I am.
After checking in I spent a fair bit of time on the Net, getting my previous entries synched and photos uploaded and adding comments. After the Sun went down I went out and wandered a bit through the entertainment district near here, taking some more photos; I eventually had dinner at a place that seemed to be the local equivalent of a Williams Coffee Pub. I ordered the spaghetti carbonara, and it was a bit disappointing (looked a fair bit better on the menu than on the plate) but I guess it was another new experience, and I didn't want a more elaborate meal.
Then I came back and spent a lot of time writing this entry. Tomorrow, I have no specific plans.
This is an inside -a- hall Private telephone
pay-per-view card dispenser
Hotels in the West go to great lengths to make you as comfortable as possible about watching pay-per-view porn movies in your room - usually, it'll just appear on your bill as "pay per view" without specifying what, and they provide a couple of innocuous choices for plausible deniability - but the Japanese go a step further. Pay-per-view porn is unlocked by prepaid cards, which you can buy discreetly from this machine, and it won't appear on your bill at all. The room also came with a lurid brochure detailing, minute by minute, exactly what videos would be playing when. That's important in a culture with so many extremely specific fetishes as this one has, because if you're not careful and tune in a minute or two too early or too late, you can easily end up seeing something you would have preferred not to see.
Asahi Slat
Slat (Japanese text indicates it's pronounced more or less like the English word "slat") was the cheapest alcoholic beverage available in the Hotel Sunroute Nara vending machine. 140円, if I remember correctly. It seems to be a typical Japanese lemon-flavoured "health" drink with added Vitamin C, sweetened with artificial sweeteners, plus some hops flavour (which did not improve matters) and 3% alcohol.
OH, and I forgot to mention (probably my brain blocking the memory for mental-health reasons) that Slat also features blobs of jelly at the bottom, but just a few; not enough blobs for me to be sure that it's a "jelly" drink and they are meant to be there at all.
I wondered "Who buys this stuff?" and on careful thought, I think the answer is that the target market can be described as "persons who are trying to get teenage girls drunk." Consider: it's weak (suggesting it's for drinkers who are physically smaller than many adults, and maybe have lower acquired tolerance); it doesn't taste like an alcoholic beverage (suggesting drinkers who, unlike let's say averge teenage *boys*, don't particularly like alcohol); it's cheap; and it's advertised as low-calorie.
JR Nara train station
JR Nara train station
JR Nara train station
pedestrian overpass, near Tennouji Station, Osaka
Possibly not clear from the photo is that this overpass is *really tall*. You have to climb a lot of stairs on both sides.
Abeno Line tram
This is, apparently, one of the last surviving tramways.
Abeno Line tram tracks
Abeno Seimei Jinja banner
Characters appear mirrored because that's how characters on banners work in Japanese - they read toward the flagpole even if that's right-to-left. Note the pentagram at the top. Abeno Seimei, the man whose deified spirit is enshrined here, was basically a wizard.
Abeno Seimei Jinja from the front
Abeno Seimei Jinja interpetive sign
The smaller sign at left advertises fortune-telling, but only from 1 to 5pm and I was here in the morning.
Abeno Seimei Jinja
guardian, Abeno Seimei Jinja
ema, Abeno Seimei Jinja
statue of Abeno Seimei, at his shrine
fox statue, Abeno Seimei Jinja
Inari shrine at Abeno Seimei Jinja
Abeno Seimei Jinja
bottle sculptures, near Abeno Seimei Jinja
something for the Eva fans
These are famous anime characters. Try to guess what is being advertised. Hint: there is something they all have in common in this picture, and for most of them it's at odds with their depiction in the show.
Abêno Abêno and his friends
This is what they do to you centuries later if you're a famous occultist.
human traffic light
This man's job is to stand on the corner all day showing passers-by a "don't walk" sign when the perfectly functional automatic crossing light says "don't walk," and lowering it when the crossing light says "walk." Someone is paying him to do this, maybe not a lot, but obviously enough that he isn't dying of starvation. And there are men like him working every crosswalk in the neighbourhood where I took the photo. How does Japan manage to have a functioning economy at all, let alone being the world's third-largest?
one of these things is not like the others
I guess the hippo can't be named "Hippy" because that would be too silly. I'm not sure what to make of "Browny."
Million God
Venus Gallery is a pachinko and slot-machine gambling parlour. The machines in such places are often themed with anime or anime-like characters. Such as, in this case, the God of the Hebrews.
Waku Waku
QUEER BIRD
train ticket gate, under repair
Conan's Mystery Tour
Conan is an anime character who solves mysteries. JR would like to sell you a mystery tour endorsed by him.
discount store, near Tennouji Station, Osaka
Women Only
Special train cars for women who prefer not to be groped, or who prefer to be groped by other women, while riding the train.
It was quite noticeable to me that the women actually using the "women only" cars were, demographically speaking, not women at risk for the sexual assaults that motivated the creation of such cars in the first place. Common pattern worldwide: we're scared of something, we take measures against it, and then those measures are turned to totally different purposes while the original problem just gets worse.
Beard Papa's
I know a man who commented at length on Beard Papa's false claim of serving "Piping Hot Cream Puffs." Unfortunately, the slogan here has been watered down to "Fresh'n Tasty."
Hot Menu Casual Frozen Foods
It makes sense - the foods are frozen while stored in the machine, so they'll stay fresh, and then the machine heats them up when you buy them, so it's Hot Menu. I think Japanese people only use this machine when they're REALLY drunk. I considered it, but decided to try my luck with the "Indo Club" curry restaurant (its sign is just visible in the Beard Papa's picture) instead.
I think this is a fuel tank for delivery vans. Or, possibly, a uranium enrichment facility.
zettai ryouiki
A high and narrow gap between stockings and skirt, as seen on the woman with the red bag, is called "zettai ryouiki" ("absolute territory"). Zettai ryouiki was recently voted "#1 favourite sexual turn-on" by admirers of Japanese girls. (Really, a magazine conducted a poll of Japanese men - that's not just a cute way of saying I'm into it myself.) Zettai ryouiki is imagined to go with the "tsundere" personality type, which is also pretty high on that list in its own right.
A Year of Your "In Provence"
Jesus Praise Church
Skal (the original mix)
The kana indicates that the vowel in Skal (or Skál?) is a long O, so it's pronounced like "Skoal." It tastes like Calpis, which in turn tastes like a mixture of Sprite and milk prevented from curdling by the Dark Arts.
remote controls, Fraser Residence
Left to right, these are for the air conditioner, the stereo, the DVD player, the cable television "set-top" box, and the flat-panel television.
hotel sign, Osaka
The sign on the left describes how many hours two persons can stay for 3660円, depending on check-in time and the day of the week. The one on the right describes things you get free of charge (無料) with membership in their frequent-customer club.
"Frequent customer club at the love hotel" sounds like the punchline to a bad joke, of course, but given how typical it is for Japanese adults to live with their parents in small shared dwellings (unlike in North America, doing that carries no particular connotation of being an immature social outcast) it's reasonable that two people could be frequent customers here even if they only ever check in with each other.
スーパーポテト・Super Potato (video game store)
stray cats, Nanba, Osaka
Unfortunately, I don't think these cats, hiding in a cramped space in a busy city, have happy lives. They looked hungry and scared. But they had a group of girls cooing over them, so at least they're in some sense loved. How good is it to be loved by humans who don't comprehend your needs?
Lumberjack House
From their Web site, it is apparent that Lumberjack House sells rugged outdoorsy-looking shoes and boots. Text on the sign refers to "working shoes."
1 comment
Beth Skala - 2011-09-11 17:59