2024 Travelogue - Osaka

 

Breakfast at Komeda Coffee to start our day

The Japan trip to end all trips - that was the idea when my mom suggested going overseas to celebrate her 70th birthday. Japan was not her first choice, by any stretch of the imagination - I highly doubt it was her 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th choice, to be honest, but even though it was her birthday, somehow everyone else's enthusiasm for my suggestion won her over. And I'm honestly very glad it did, because when you have a mix of limited-mobility seniors and three adult kids with wildly different interests and energy levels, we were still able to pack a maximum level of experiences into the trip just by virtue of going to a country that one of us knew really, really well. It wasn't a relaxing vacation, but it was certainly unforgettable.

We hit the ground running after landing from a Vancouver stopover at Kansai International Airport, which even in May, was intolerably muggy for this family of east coasters. (Thank God we didn't go in August. Even I have flashbacks of the heat that hit me full in the face when I arrived in the country for my JET orientation.) I'd booked an airBNB near Dotonbori, because I wanted everything to be as walkable as possible for this first leg. I didn't know what peoples' energy levels would be like for going to the opposite sides of the city or further afield like Himeji or Nara, so I stuck with Nippombashi Station as a base, thinking it would make the exeunt easier when we left a few days later.

Rented an apartment on the banks of the Dotonbori River

Nothing had changed in the area, to my relief. It was more crowded than it used to be, and people were lined up for what I presume was the latest trendy spot to eat according to TikTok, but other than that it was the same old Dotonbori. We went out for kushikatsu (oops, should have saved that for when we got to Shinsekai) and had an early night the first night.

On Day 2, I took them to nearby Kuromon Market, which is a place I didn't spend nearly enough time at when I was living here. It was one of Emily's favourite spots in the city (no surprise, since she is such a proficient home cook). Then we went to Shinsekai and had lunch at an izakaya there. We saw Billiken, though we didn't go up the tower - it seems I will have to wait another few years before I eventually get to the observatory at either Tsutenkaku or Kyoto Tower. We also ran into a cool retro arcade in the shopping street on the way back to the subway station. 

 

 

This arcade was near Dobutsuen-Mae Station

From there we headed back uptown and saw the Umeda Sky Building, to which I'd never been. I didn't realize my mom was adverse to heights, so going up the escalators was an experience for her (oops). I also didn't realize there was no actual garden at the top of the building and that the Floating Garden Observatory was a misnomer. I had convinced her up there with the promise of a garden! (Double oops.) Still, we got a great view of Osaka, cloudy though it was. We finished off the Umeda visit with a quick trip to Yodobashi Camera, where I picked up some new headphones (when in Yodobashi, I just have to buy headphones) and then headed back to Namba for the evening. My parents wanted to check out KFC, but since the Namba location I knew from the 'curse of the Colonel' was no longer around, we ended up at Namba Parks for dinner, before returning to our little apartment.

Day 3 was set aside as a "day trip" day for whoever wanted to go further afield. My brother wanted very much to visit Nara, and I thought my stepfather would want to see Himeji, and I had been sent a video of the monorail at sunset at Ikoma Sanjo and I sort of wanted to check it out. In the end we did exactly none of those things; us three kids woke up at 8 am raring to go, and we ended up head to Universal Studios Japan. USJ wasn't originally on the itinerary, because a) I'm the only person who speaks Japanese, so the anime attractions aren't that interesting to my siblings and b) they removed the Back to the Future ride and I'm still salty about it. However, the idea of Super Nintendo World got brought up, and even though it wasn't possible to cheap out and use a Twilight Pass like I usually do at USJ, we decided to leave the parents in their beds and venture west. 

Yoshi's Adventure

My siblings and I are sort of an odd combo together. We have fun when we hang out, and we have some overlapping interests, but each of us is a totally different personality type. For me, with my recent physical problems, standing in a lineup for any reason made me not want to do the thing. (Especially if it's a LONG lineup.) But that's the theme park experience, and we were way too late to buy express passes to anything. As for my siblings, they were interested in Nintendo World but nothing else in the park. So we arrived, bought tickets using the birthday discount (May birthdays, yay!), registered for Nintendo World, and when we saw that our Nintendo Land entry was 3:30 PM and it was presently 9 in the morning, we promptly left to kill time elsewhere. XD; I would have liked to check out the Detective Conan cafe or maybe the Demon Slayer ride, but we were looking at 100+ minutes in line (and all in Japanese), and that wasn't doable for anybody. Instead, we went to DenDen Town to buy my brother a Super Famicom.

 

The lay of the land had changed a bit in DenDen Town, but not too much. More small shops boarded up, though whether they were just taking a holiday or had never come back post-pandemic, I couldn't tell. The relocation of Super Potato was unexpected, to me, and the prices there had skyrocketed. The days of grabbing a loose but functional retro game cartridge of a known title for 500 yen are basically over. The shops know that people are willing to pay for nostalgia properties, and we couldn't find a SuFami with all the components for less than 10,000 yen. A far cry from the one I bought my first week in the city, with all the trimmings, for 3500...!

 

We hit a lot of shops in the area before turning around, after lunch at CoCo Ichibanya, and heading back to USJ for our Nintendo World timed entry. We rented me a pushchair since I was way past the point of tolerating standing still for any length of time, and my brother wheeled me around the park. It was a bit inconvenient to manoeuvre, since it was SO crowded (guaranteed that everyone who'd entered earlier in the day was still there!) but it was a lifesaver, especially when we needed to line up for a ride. There wasn't time to ride multiples, so we went on the Yoshi's Adventure ride, but the real reason we were there was to take in the lay of the land, which did not disappoint.

 

Sunset at Super Nintendo World

The mini-games were a ton of fun, too, and we bought a wristband to get the full experience. By the time everything was winding down for the night (it was still spring, so late closure hadn't begun for the season yet) there was just barely enough time to hit one other attraction before the park closed for the evening. My brother indulged me and went to the My Hero Acadamia show despite not having the first clue what was going on. That was very sweet of him, I thought, since he had to be tired from running around all day and also pushing me! After that, though, it was time to say goodbye, go home and pack up - after a quick stop for ramen at a hole-in-the-wall place near Nippombashi Station. The next day we planned to head to Kyoto and make that our base for the following week.

 

 

Returning to Kansai

 

View from Umeda Sky Garden (with the Gate Tower Building in the background!)

After quite a few long years away, I just came back from my first trip to West Japan in about six years. This was the first time I'd been to the Kansai Region in a long time, and my first time there with family. My fam didn't come visit me for the years I was living in Osaka - my mom is the very definition of a nervous traveller. It took a lot of convincing to finally get her to go, but now that both of my parents are retired, we'd been urging them to travel while they were still relatively healthy. And so, I planned and executed as perfect a 2-week Japan vacation as I could manage, starting in Osaka, of course.

It was so satisfying showing them all the things I love about the Kansai area. I was a little selfish in cutting Tokyo time SO short that they barely saw any of it at all (1 day in Atami, 3 days in Tokyo), but there's so much to see and do just in Osaka and Kyoto alone (never mind all the great places I would have loved to take them in Nara, Wakayama, Shiga, Kobe, et al) that even the week and a half spent there wasn't enough.

Not much had changed, in the places we went, except of course for the extreme number of tourists. On one level, I hate contributing to the overtourism problem. We skipped most places like Kinkakuji, Gion and Kyomizudera that would have been staples to take guests to ten years ago, in the pre-Instagram world. I tried to go off the beaten path when I could. When I saw the chaos of people at Fushimi Inari (when I lived there, there was never any significant number of people on the hiking trails, no matter what time of day we visited), I had tried to prepare myself for the fact that it had become one of the #1 destinations in Kyoto, but it was still mind-boggling to see. The days of using Fushimi Inari's trails as a way to get your daily exercise in (yes, I tried this in 2008 or so, since Keihan Fushimi was just a hop, skip and a jump away from my home station) are long gone. I did get up at 7 AM and hit the trail for old time's sake, and I mostly avoided the crowds, but I had to turn back at the pond, since we were due to move on to our next destination that morning. On that same day, I encountered my first extreme shinkansen delay - the eastbound Tokaido was 30 minutes late leaving Kyoto. Couldn't believe that happened on the day of my parents' very first and only shinkansen trip.

I have a lot to say about the trip, but not enough space to say it all in one post, so I'll divide it into a few entries. I hope you'll enjoy them.

If You're Happy And You Know It

Ride a bike!

(But not in Toronto, in winter.)

It really is unapologetically pink...I guess I see why M was so dismayed when they opened this sucker up at Calgary Airport!

The Young and the Chariotless

When I landed back on Canadian soil in August of 2010, the first thing I did was purchase a bicycle. Having a new bike right away, I hoped, would take away the sting of leaving behind my mama-chari in Osaka, at the very last minute, as I hastily dropped the keys with a Post-It note on my co-worker's desk on the final day. I needed the bike right up until that day, and I didn't have time to deal with boxing it up for transport across the Pacific. I thought that at least if I left it at school, it would be used by someone, and perhaps someday I would see it again. I took the second key home with me, just in case.

The first week home, I bought a cheap Wal-Mart bicycle. I needed to get to work, and I'd become accustomed to the independence of travelling by bike. I also bought a helmet, because unlike in Japan, I was significantly more concerned about being hit by a car. It was a Raleigh five-speed cruiser, and not an expensive one; it did have a partial chain guard, which was the main thing I was missing about my mama-chari at the time, as I remembered ripping up a few pairs of jeans on my mountain bike as a youth. It also had the curved handlebars I liked on cruisers. 

I have to assume the Japanese adapted their bicycles from European ones, as they were trading with the Netherlands as early as the 1600s; Japanese bikes bear strong similarities to Dutch ones. The covered chain guard and skirt guard are very uncommon in North America. Fender mudflaps and rear racks occasionally show up on American-made bikes, but are considered standard in Japan, along with the rear wheel lock and ubiquitous front basket. I would have liked to go for a bike with all the trimmings, but I had to settle for what Wal-Mart had in their inventory at the time. In retrospect, I was actually lucky to get a bike that had two out of the six features I wanted. I installed a rear rack and basket myself.

Eventually, as all Wal-Mart bikes are wont to do, my bike began losing steam in its 4th year, and during a particularly rough trip down into the Nordheimer Ravine one autumn, my jacket bounced out of my rear basket and twirled itself around the derailleur, which fortunately did not end in my dying in the ravine. The bike was never particularly good at switching gears again.

Dutch in action at Casa Loma

But we're going off on a tangent now. As I searched for a replacement to my bike (I had taken that cheap Wal-Mart bike with me on the plane to Toronto, wrapped in a tarp - can you believe it?) I decided that it had to be Dutch or nothing. I wanted a skirt guard; I wanted a proper rear rack. I wanted a mama-chari. I walked down Bloor Street taking photos of bikes I liked and jotting down their make and model to Google later. I never walked by a bike without giving it a once-over. To my surprise, the premium to get such luxuries as full chain guards required paying CAD $600+ for the bike. As I looked at bike shop after bike shop, almost buying a Giant-brand Liv Simple, I realized that I would never be able to tick all the boxes affordably. I finally settled for a step-through Beater Bike, with a partial chain, and a rear rack. What I hadn't bargained on was how much less hill-friendly the Beater was going to be compared to my Raleigh, with its fat tires and five speeds. The Beater, gorgeous though it was, was useless on hills, and the tires were the perfect size for getting caught in streetcar tracks. Riding it was exhausting. So I went back to the drawing board, formulating a plan for my trip to Japan in February to just buy a cheap mama-chari, have them box it up right in the shop, walk it to the post office and pay to have it sent home. I figured I'd be out $150 for the bike, $50 for domestic, $100 for the international shipping. Maybe a bit from customs on the other side. That sounded a lot better than the $600-ish I was pricing for Dutch-style bikes with gears in Toronto.

I think you guys already know this is going to go downhill.

I left the job of actually buying one until the last moments of our trip. I looked at bikes at Asahi Cycle in Rinku Town and Tokyo, but I never spotted one close to a post office (an essential for this plan to work). Eventually, when I was on my own in Tokyo with just one day left in the trip, I realized this wasn't going to work. I went on Rakuten and found a seller that did international shipping for Daiwa bikes, and I bought a cute pink Nana+ bike. No need to drag anything to the post office myself! They shipped to Canada!

...except that they only shipped to Canada through their proxy service. I had used Tenso before, but not in a few years, and the hoops they had me jump through just to get the bike shipped anywhere were out of this world. I waited two weeks without seeing my item appear on the "my page" section, even though the domestic shipping said it'd been delivered. I emailed them, and had no response for days. I started to worry that maybe this company was less reputable than I originally thought. I sent a third help request, which got a response at last, and was informed since it was oversized, they hadn't yet connected the purchase to my account, oh, and also it was too oversized to be shipped abroad. It had arrived fully assembled. I learned later that this is the standard for bike shops in Japan. Tenso said they were unable to downsize it for me by removing the pedals/turning the handlebars, as they weren't trained to do so.

From there we began the lengthy process of finding a solution, any solution. Tenso offered to ship it elsewhere in Japan for me, but in order to do that, I had to verify my address in Canada. Mind you, I'd already done that when I bought things through Tenso in the past, but it had to be done again, including scans of my driver's license and the receipt of a postcard at my mailing address in Canada. That's right, I had to wait for a physical postcard to arrive by postal mail at my apartment. Only when they were satisfied that I really did live at my address in Toronto would they allow me to redirect the bike somewhere else, but obviously, not to Toronto! They urged me to let them courier it to a friend.

I don't have tons of friends in Japan whom I'd be comfortable asking for a favour so large as "can you receive this bike in the mail, bring it to a bike shop to take it apart, and put it back in the mail?" and even fewer that I wouldn't mind being laughed at by. (As genuinely fond as I am of my co-workers at 〇〇 High School, and as much as they already knew I was quirky, I prefer not to be remembered as "that one that asked me to ship a bike to her".) In the end, I asked my friend Nicole, of Irish Chocolate fame. She returned to Japan after leaving 〇〇 University and is now an English teacher in Chiba. She saved me from a separate mishap involving buying Mister Donut cups on Yahoo! Auctions, and so I thought she might be able to intervene again. Luckily for me, Nicole agreed, and some time later my bike appeared, fully formed, at her apartment.

Nicole, bless her, bought a bike-sized cardboard box online and wheeled it all down to her local shop, where they took it apart and packed it up. Then she brought it back to her place (how!?!?) and called Japan Post for an at-home pickup. Except...now it didn't fall within Japan Post's size guidelines. The JP Post guys returned to Nicole's apartment two hours later with the box in tow. It was too big! She told me it would have to be done via a commercial shipping company like FedEx. Now we were getting way, way too expensive, and I wasn't sure what to do next. I'd already sunk more money into the box and the domestic shipping to Nicole, and the losses were too big for me to cut now. We decided to Frankenstein the box to make it smaller, since that approach worked for Emily when she sent her kotatsu home, but after some measuring, it literally needed to be half the size. Nicole promised to look up some options when she got home from her vacation in Europe.

I decided to take a different tactic. My roommate, M, made plans to go to Japan for a concert in October. I decided to ask her if she'd check the bike as her second piece of luggage (oversized). She agreed without too much protest, to my relief, and so I asked Nicole to have the bike couriered to Narita Airport instead. Surprise - the luggage shipping company that we usually use for the airport, doesn't accept bikes. Nothing about the size, never mind that it was in a cardboard box and disassembled, they just don't do bicycles. Nicole had to call JAL ABC, because apparently Sagawa thought we were asking them to ship some expensive French racing bike worth $8,000 and not the little steel mama-chari I bought at Daiwa Cycle for under two hundred bucks. Luckily JAL ABC agreed to take it (after warning me about a COD fee) and it was delivered to Narita on the day M was scheduled to return to Canada.

Ah, but it's not over yet! As I gallivanted through Montreal on a rainy Saturday night, just before midnight, my cell phone alarm went off, reminding me that "M Is At The Airport Right Now." And then there's an email in my inbox dated 30 minutes prior, saying "Does your bike have suspension? Because if it does, I can't take it with me." Followed by, "If you don't answer soon, I have to leave." Oh noooooooo--

I emailed back as quickly as my thumbs would function, NO, NO SUSPENSION

ALSO PLEASE DON'T LEAVE

After all, what was the next step if the bike got stranded at the airport? Call ABC and try to convince them to ship it back to Nicole (I really wanted to stop bugging her) or to another friend? Jes kindly agreed to receive it when I sent a desperate-sounding email asking for her address, but I didn't want to face the phone call where I explained that I, an uninvolved third party, wanted to use a foreign credit card to have this package sent not back to the sender or recipient but to someone else altogether. Also, what was Jes going to do when she got it? It was just too big!

Luckily, M hadn't checked in for her flight just yet, and decided to forge ahead. Air Canada, bless them, accepted the box without complaint, and it was successfully on its way to Canada at last. I waited until 2:30 AM for the inevitable email about something going wrong, before finally dropping off to sleep. In the morning I called for an airport van cab, and then I called The Bike Joint down on Harbord Street to arrange assembly, and then I recruited a friend with a car to drive it down there with me. BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE.

It wasn't until she arrived in Calgary and they opened the box for inspection that M realized the extent to which I had thrown her under the bus.

I found this note written on the whiteboard when I got home, after M was safely sleeping off the jet lag:

...but at least I have my bike.

Small-Town Adventure

For my 2011 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project, I decided to write a story about small-town Japan. I had written a story set in Tokyo for a previous year, and I wanted to go in a different direction, even though I had very little experience with small-town life. (〇〇 City is not exactly the size of Osaka, but it's very, very far from being inaka.)

I enjoy research - I'm the sort of person who will get caught up for hours on a winding path of Wikipedia articles. I particularly like learning about urban development, and trains. (I probably have a massive article due in the near future about our train journey from Hokkaido to Kyushu taken in February.) So for me, not knowing much beyond the JET Journal perspective on inaka life was not a deterrent, but a challenge!

While preparing for NaNo this time, I decided to choose a place I was interested in, and then do the research to make the setting plausible. I had of course lived in Osaka and I had written extensively about Tokyo the previous year, so it was time to go further afield, and there was an obvious first choice. I'd recently re-read Ash by Holly Thompson (set partially in Kumamoto), and also discovered the blog nipponDAZE, which chronicles JET life in Oita-ken in the 90s. Kyushu was right up my alley, and I was sure there had to be a town somewhere near Beppu - where Emily and I spent New Year's in 2010 - that a disillusioned exchange student might find her calling in. A few Google searches of JET blogs in Oita turned up a match with a population short of 8,000 people and no train station of its own. At the time, it was not available on Google Street View. (It is now, if you want to have a look.) I made email contact with a JET alumni who had a fabulous website - I'm sure Joel never expected anyone would try to write a novel based only on his blog's descriptions of his town- and started from there.

As with any NaNo project, of course, November ended and then I was slammed with the JLPT, prepping for Christmas, nengajo, and the usual writer's burnout that comes when you devote 30,000 words to a topic and then realize you don't know where the story is going. So I never quite finished the tale, though I intend to go back and revisit it for NaNo 2015. 

Brother Google watches over our travels.

With that said, my small-town novel was at the forefront of my mind when I planned my two weeks in Japan this past February. In 2011, I often daydreamed about quitting my telephone job and moving to Kyushu to write the great Japan-set YA novel, living at Khaosan Beppu and trading cleaning services for room and board. Or, if I had some savings, in a little one-room apartment with a tatami floor, because I'm still not over that. By 2015, though, I was at a different point in my life, and there wasn't much chance of getting a lot of time for creativity while travelling. I decided to somehow fit Kyushu - even though I had never driven a car in Japan, and our primary destination was Hokkaido - into the trip. My travelling companion had little interest in hot springs, but Kyushu was close to my heart now, and she obliged me, for whatever reason. I applied for an international drivers' license and booked us two nights in a ryokan, following our day in Kyoto. We worked an almost-nonstop pace from Sapporo to Beppu, via blue train and shinkansen, in three days. 

Alighting in Beppu, Cassie and I spent the night, then rented a car the following morning for my "research trip." (She manned the camera and is responsible for most of the photos below.) We spent four hours wandering and driving in the area without any direction at all, just exploring. At first, I really thought I was imposing, because we could have been at the Hells in Beppu by that point, or - so I imagined Cass would prefer - way back in Nakano Broadway, working the gatchapon machines. Somehow, though, it became a grand adventure. The tiny, run-down shrine on the cliffs, the bronze turtle statues, the quest to find some restaurant - any restaurant - to eat at - we were soon laughing and snapping photos of everything, getting lost, running away from adults who we thought might be suspicious of gaijin taking pictures of the school, and slowly navigating hairpin curves in the road while the super-confident local drivers leaned on their horns behind us. Oh yeah, and going through the ETC toll lane by accident and bringing all toll operations to a halt while we tried to sort out what was going on. (The rental car had an ETC broadcaster, but no card in it.) We were actually very sad to leave the town without seeing it all, but had another appointment to keep in Beppu that afternoon.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day and the highlight of the trip, particularly for Kyushu - the rain would start pouring that evening and chase us all the way back to Kansai. And a good memory. I hope if you've been to this town, you'll enjoy our photo memories of the day.

Arriving from the highway

Cassie mans the camera while I drive down what we think is the main road

Small-town feel

We're keeping an eye out for places characters might visit

These apartment buildings look like someplace an ALT might live!

We asked the GPS to take us to the post office, and so we pulled in here to decide where next

...as it turned out, we were RIGHT beside the school!

A peek inside the baseball clubhouse (?)

School view

School from the opposite side

Famous for its wine, and turtle soup. Grapes are everywhere!

Street shots

I thought this was very striking

Great mansion name!

Decided to drive over this bridge and see what was on the other side

Turtles on the bridge

Neither of us can resist torii gates

Not the same gate. This one appeared on the other side of the tunnel you see above, and leads up the mountain. We decided to climb the stairs; see what we could find

I was not expecting to find a Peace Pole here

Had we come six weeks later, this place would undoubtedly be flush with sakura

Stone tablets at Sanjo shrine

Seems to be falling into disrepair. We didn't see anyone else at all, either

Strolling on the shrine grounds

Sanjo shrine grounds

A weathered path

This river borders the town in the northwest

Back in the car to continue adventuring

A winery? Or could it be something like the Town Hall?

We drove to the next town by accident

This was a fun-looking spot!

Walking courses

On the outskirts of town, now; ready to return to Beppu

 

But first, lunch at the Konoiwanoshō

I really wanted ice cream...

 

Plenty of the special; turtle soup (I just had the dangojiru)

Thanks! See you again!

Writing About Tokyo

Commemorating the 1964 Olympics at Jingu Bashi

I don't think I've ever mentioned on Tadaimatte before that I had written a novel - it's true! 

As you might have guessed, story writing is an outlet for me, and in 2008 while living in Osaka, I devoted quite a lot of effort to penning my first book. At the time, I was enamoured with Tokyo, and deeply interested in studying the evolution of popular culture in The Big Mikan. I went to the library in Hikarigaoka and thumbed through photos of the area from the 60s, I penned thoughtful poems about umbrellas and imagined the lives of the people bobbing through Hachiko Square, watched Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, traced the steps of Shiki and Beat and Neku from The World Ends With You, read vintage Tezuka manga, attended Comiket, visited all the shops Shigesato Itoi recommended in interviews about MOTHER, sat on the bridge at Harajuku, visited Tokyo 1964 Olympic sites, trolled Jimbocho bookstores in hopes of finding the original 1983 English translation of The Rose of Versailles, and generally fell in love with the way the city had been depicted in works of fiction. I used words like hokoten (short for hokousha tengoku) and expected people around me to actually know what they meant.

In reality, Tokyo - particularly the long trip I took alone in 2008 - was a fairly private experience, simply because I didn't know anyone else who got excited over things like Olympic plaques, croquette rolls and showa retro. I spent something like twelve days wandering the city mostly alone, with no plan, eating curry and rice balls and occasionally having only the vaguest idea of where I was going to spend the night (!). I visited Yokohama and Hakone during this memorable vacation, but spent most of it in Shibuya and Odaiba, having real "down time" in Tokyo for the first time.

One post couldn't possibly sum up how I feel about the capital...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book. I sent it around to just a couple of publishers, as it was such a specialized topic that I couldn't imagine a big company picking it up. I've sat on it long enough now, though, that I've begun to think that self-publishing is the way to go - as intimidating as that is!

So, over the next weeks and months, I'll be continuing to work on this project with the help of my good friend Zippo, and maybe soon you'll be able to download the book right here!

*edit*

And now, you can! Whoa! Check out Meet You By Hachiko on Amazon!

Capsule Hotels

I've always been comfortable enough in small spaces, so the concept of capsule hotels really intrigued me when I first prepared to move to Japan. I looked up information on the Internet about where I might be able to find capsule hotels around Osaka and Tokyo for my (envisioned) many nights out on the town! As it so happened, I was too much of a cheapskate to stay out overnight often when I could make the last train home, but I did have the chance to try out a few capsules while in Japan.

If you don't know what a capsule hotel is, nothing sums it up quite like a visual:

Interior of a capsule

A capsule hotel is just a place to lay your head - you're trading space and amenities for the price, which is usually in the $30 USD/CAD range. I often stayed at the above hotel (Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza Shinsaibashi) in Osaka during the nights between the JET Mid-Year Seminar, a training session held over three days more than an hour away from my apartment. The cost of the hotel (¥2,900) was more than worth saving the 3 hours of travel time heading home after a long day and then back to Abiko first thing in the morning - not to mention the ¥600+ yen each way in train fare.

Most capsule hotels do not accept women, and this was one of two that I was aware of in Osaka that did. In fact, I'm told that the womens' floor (sealed off with a lock to prevent intrusion) at Asahiplaza Shinsaibashi was much nicer than the mens', and with less snoring. The beds you see in the photo above are stacked two units high and luggage is kept in a separate locker. In the womens' area, there was a public bath, sauna, television room and reading lounge. Guests are provided with pajamas and towels, and the bathing area has toothbrushes, brushes and combs kept in a sterilizer, hair dryers, lotions, Q-tips, make-up sponges and a few other disposables. Most hotels have a few mainstays built into their capsules - usually a television, radio and alarm clock are standard; the Shinsaibashi hotel also had an interior fan and some shelves. 

Each time I visited, I made sure to take advantage of the beautiful baths at this hotel. I wasn't sure I could manage it for the first time if someone else was in the bathing room, since it was still very early on in my stay and I was nervous at being the only foreigner there. I was alone when I stowed my clothes in the bathing room lockers and managed to almost finish washing my hair before another guest, a lady in her mid-40s, came in and started to shower. She didn't even give me a second look. so after a moment my awkward feeling passed and that was that. 

That first bath was amazing. I hadn't yet experienced Spa World, and this was a whole different beast anyway; it was more of a sento (neighbourhood bath) environment. The shampoo, rinse and soap from the showers smelled gorgeous, too, and after relaxing in the bath (made of black marble) I went to the sauna to dry off. They had everything I needed to make myself comfortable for the night and the nervousness entirely passed. That evening's sleep was very, very comfortable.

Most capsules are really pretty standard, though some, like Kyoto's 9 hours, really take it to the next level. Over the next few years I tried out a few capsule hotels in Tokyo as well, including some off-the-beaten-path choices like the womens'-only VIVI Roppongi one weekend when I had taken the Seishun 18 to Tokyo on a whim and didn't have a single toiletry with me except the contents of my purse. I still regret not taking good photos of that place, since it was really fantastic.

Awful photo of the bunks at the fabulous VIVI Roppongi

It was my first time going to Roppongi, and I was rather disappointed with the area, sadly. VIVI was great, especially the rock sauna, but the next few times I visited Tokyo on a whim back I ended up back in Shibuya instead. I also stayed at the Green Plaza Shinjuku once, but their facilities weren't worth the price in comparison. It just wasn't as nice as my capsule hotel in Osaka or as the capsule beds at Khaosan in Asakusa. 

I still regret not getting to stay in a tatami capsule at Capsule Ryokan Kyoto. Next time, Japan!!