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.

 

 

Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time. 

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward. 

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko. 

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers. 

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com. 

 Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery. 

 It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too. 

 Thanks for sticking with me!

It Finally Happened

Something was holding me back for a long time, but you know what? I decided, a ridiculous ten years later, that I was going to put this out there.

Thanks all, for your support!

TOKYO CITY 憶えているかい ホームの片隅で

So I've been fairly busy with a lot of things lately, and while I tried (and will continue) to keep work-related things off the blog, I thought I'd check in and note that I recently finished my job in one local Japan-related field and moved to another. I'm sad to have left my office and the great people there, but my contract was ending, and an opportunity came up that I couldn't refuse. So what this does mean for me...?

Well...!

As it turns out, it means a lot of travel to Japan.

I'm so excited to have already been back to Tokyo (and eventually I want to take a vacation to my true second home Osaka, of course) and the first visit was really and truly surreal. Maybe it sounds really silly, but I think anyone who has had their heart in two countries at once can relate. It's not about Japan itself but the feeling of being immersed again in a place that was once "home" that I missed very much. 

I took the train from Narita out to Azabu-Juuban, and on the long ride, it was hard to do anything but wax nostalgic! It was early, but even on a Saturday at 8 AM, students in uniforms were taking up most of the train car. On their way to their club practices, I'd imagine. One high school-aged boy sat beside me and I immediately recognized his cologne or body spray as a familiar scent from my own classroom at 〇〇 High School. I'd never been on that train line before or seen that scenery, but just being there on that train, sitting with the Saturday shoppers and the schoolkids and breathing the air and seeing the signs fly past the window, I was feeling so natsukashii. 

I wasn't meeting my friend until 9:30, so I strolled through Azabu-Juuban for a time, a little wowed from how it had changed since I last visited, with Ami-chan years before. Ichinohashi Park was completely gone, and a construction site was in its place. Azabu-Juuban's main station entrace, outside the Shotengai, had also been spruced up a bit. Funny, but I never visited Azabu again after taking Ami-chan there, even when I had lots of time to kill in Tokyo in the past. I guess I felt that as a pop-culture location, most of the places I would have liked to see had already been gone for years by the time I moved to Japan. 

It was really nice walking through there though, and after a stunning only-in-Japan Cantaloupe Melon and Cream Frappuccino at Starbucks and a melon pan run, I eventually ended up in Roppongi Hills to meet my friend. We saw the Sailor Moon exhibition and had lunch at CoCo Ichiban, which I really still don't have the recipe nailed down for yet. Then we were out of time, and I had to head to work.

I was trying to pretend that this was a normal Tokyo trip like the many ones I'd taken before, but as on the visit to Japan a year ago, I couldn't shake the sense of "limited-time" urgency. I probably never will be able to manage that totally, given that when you're on a company trip, the clock is ticking. On the bright side, the next trip is already in the calendar.

See you soon.

Tadaima!

Hello, tadaima - it's been a while!

So last year I quit my telephone-jockeying work and moved on to something a little closer to my heart - being involved with the Japanese-Canadian community. While my work days are significantly more fulfilling...they are also far more full. It's hard to catch a breathing break and I certainly can't blog on the job (though I can certainly time-delay my post queues to come out in the mornings, for those of you who do have that luxury!), and the nights are filled up with cooking, commuting and my many hobbies. Plenty of Canadian hobbies (does watching British television count as a Canadian hobby?) but also getting more into the swing of things with my Japanese as well, after a long draught.

I took the JLPT last month - now that was a disaster!

I attended a tea bowl making ceremony. It's actually been almost a year since I did tea properly. Oops!

Yesterday, I carried the mikoshi (shrine) at the JCCC's New Year's Festival! 

I made toshikoshi soba on New Year's with my friends.

I suppose I'd been experiencing a bit of cultural burnout, not unlike the sort of thing many JETs go through at the end of their first year in Japan. Luckily, it's been abating, and more recently I've found myself being drawn inexplicably back to writing and researching about Japan - mostly because I have a book idea swimming around my head and, of course, it's best to strike while the iron is hot! So I've been poring over books about the Japanese royal family, Tokyo in the 1970s, womens' studies in Japan and cultural revolution. Reading research material on the subway gives me a much more fulfilling feeling than playing Candy Crush Saga.

Hopefully, as a result, you guys will see more blog posts from me in future. Fingers crossed!