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.

 

 

VHS Tape Bonanza

A box of tapes on their way out of the library

The Japan Foundation Toronto is moving, and though that means a lot of changes and adjustments for those of us who found Bloor and Avenue pretty convenient, the upside is that the library is overhauling, which means clearing out old items, which means VHS TAPE GIVEAWAYS.

You might have guessed from my persistent interest in all things retro, that I have just a teensy bit of nostalgia for decades past, with the 80s/90s (my formative years) entrenched firmly at the top. That means I don't just treasure the memories of taping my favourite shows on the family VCR - I still own the family VCR. I actually received a VCR-DVD combo unit for Christmas of 2013! However, 99% of my tape collection is at my parents' house, so I left it there to begin the long project of dubbing dozens of old favourites onto DVD whenever I visit them for the holidays.

So, when the Japan Foundation Toronto decided to get rid of most of its videotape collection to save space...well, needless to say, the airport x-ray techs probably got a kick out of my suitcase as it went through the scanner on my most recent trip back home. It was so hard to resist! I found some fabulous Tokyo-in-the-late-80s-early-90s snapshots with videos like Neighborhood Tokyo, Tokyo Date, NHK The News 1985 and Norimono Ippai. Lots of glamour shots of the Yurikamome Line, pre-extension, in that last one. I also scored the Ichikawa classic Tokyo Olympiad, and four out of a set of Japanese recent-history programs covering events like the Hanshin earthquake, the marriage of the crown Prince (now Emperor), and the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which was actually just in the newspaper here, as the 30th anniversary was yesterday.

All in all, a pretty impressive bounty of pre-millennial pop culture. I'm sad that these tapes can't be borrowed from the JFT library anymore, but on the other hand, it was good timing for me, because I was able to take the time to watch and enjoy them all, and they won't end up in a landfill, either. I was happy to see how quickly the rest of the tapes (there were at least 500 given away over two days) were picked up by other patrons to take home.

Looks like at least a few others out there still have VCRs!

Photo of the Day - Shinjuku, 1992

Today I was linked to this fantastic HD video on YouTube of Tokyo in 1992. It's so clear! I really dig urban history, so I snapped a few screenshots of my favourite moments. The video includes this nice shot of Shinjuku's Studio ALTA, a look at the Rainbow Bridge during construction (!), and a Shibuya scramble crossing that's so unrecognizable that I didn't even realize right away that I was looking at the entrance to Center Gai. Wow. Check out the video, and for extra credit, have a look at this blog post about Studio ALTA, featuring a photo of the lower half of the building, in 1989!

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!

Tower of the Sun

Prose

They said I would have my own empire to stand over, and it was true; for no one stood closer to the sun than I.

When I came to life, my kingdom was but a crater in the earth. Metal, sand and plastic stretched as far as my eyes could see, but I sensed that gleaming potential in every direction. My eyes, looking hungrily future-ward, already knew the world as it would be.

And it would be glorious.

Back then, I gazed upon parkland and the beginnings of the wheel; when they placed the Golden Mask upon my face, it was then I came to have Suita within my sights. Suita was ahead, and Festival Plaza, behind. I would see everything that was, and everything that would be.

I saw it all, my kingdom, my subjects, from there on my knoll. 

When you anticipate how your short life will end, or how it will begin to end, the most magnificent sense of perspective becomes yours. The years between my birth and the day they prised the Tree of Life from my body were no more than a moment for me – and with that my empire too began to disappear, bit by bit. Soon my protection was all but gone, along with everything else. I stood alone.

My faces, though, kept staring in all three directions – past, present, and future. I never wavered from my task, even when the lights of my eyes went out completely. Even when my kingdom – for so long that pinnacle of the ‘future’ – was razed to the ground. I could descry my own end as sharply and clearly as I understood that the future I represented would never materialize. The dream had long ended.

Ah – but was it so bad? After all, only I was blessed – or cursed – with the knowledge. No one but I could see the whole of Osaka in quite this way. And though others came who dwarfed me in stature, it was still I who would be ever nearest to the sun.

Game Center CX

Cover of the Retro Game Master/Game Centre
CX DVD collection

I am so, so excited for the English-subtitled DVD release of Game Center CX (Retro Game Master), which ships out to pre-orderers on Amazon tomorrow! (Or, if you're in Canada, Amazon.ca is actually carrying it for $10 cheaper, to my surprise!)

This amazing television show was a big thing for me during my last year in Japan. It's been running for almost ten years, but I actually didn't hear about it until it was in its eleventh season! Comedian Arino Shinya, one-half of the famous Osakan team Yoiko, is the host and star of Arino's Challenge, what was once a small segment but quickly grew into a one-hour television show about retro video games. Arino, a fan of games of all types, looks like your typical middle-aged salaryman and while he struggles often to get through even easy games, is incredibly tenacious - this man somehow beat Ninja Gaiden, but took hundreds of lives while playing Super Mario 3. 

I originally caught wind of this show on YouTube and though I didn't have the channel that it aired on, I rented the DVDs, one by one. It's a very popular show - our nearest Tsutaya had gaps in its library every time I went. (I had to bike 35 minutes away that first time just to get Volume 1!) And when I was sure that I was going to watch regularly, I went ahead and got FujiTV One, FujiTV Two and FujiTV NEXT on my beloved SkyPerfect satellite dish. 

It's funny to look at it that way now, but leaving behind the brand-new episodes of Game Center CX was a heartbreaker when I left Japan! There are ways to see some of these, of course, thanks to the Internet, but there was something special about sitting down on Thursday nights to see a brand-new episode right when it aired. My friends and I would watch the raw episodes over Skype as a group, with me providing scant real-time translations while Arino provided the laughs. Many times I would come home from work and head straight to Skype to pick out an episode with the others to watch that day. This was three years ago - well before GCCX was known by many English-speakers.

Luckily for me, since coming home, the series has gained a little more popularity in the west. The Nintendo DS game didn't make much of a splash when it was localized, unfortunately, but I feel that was the timing - if the show had come out in North America first, maybe it would have been different. Gaming website Kotaku even aired 12 episodes on their website in 2011 under the title of “Retro Game Master,” though for me these were a massive disappointment - the episodes had everything except the main game challenge taken out, and the dubbing was terrible. The translations were dubious at best and many details left out. 

However...what Kotaku did do was bring a lot of attention to the show, and that's why we're now getting those episodes, overhauled, on DVD by Discotek Media and translated with subtitles by a fan with genuine passion for the series!

Sadly, the show still can't be released intact - it doesn't contain many segments due to licensing issues, though the Japanese DVD releases omitted these as well. Still, even if it can't be perfect, I am so ready to support this release, just to bring more Game Center CX fans to the world and encourage more DVDs down the line. GCCX will always be a nostalgic reminder of my hobbies in Japan!

So get out there and buy it! If you're a fan of video games at all, you don't want to live even another week without seeing this show!

Photo of the Day - Dotonbori 1970

Swinging in the rain, Japan’s “now” generation invades Dotombori, a street in downtown Osaka lined with restaurants and places of amusement. The five-petaled cherry blossom emblem of Expo ‘70 competes for attention with a gaudy welter of neon signs flashing traditional characters. 

National Geographic, March 1970

Photo of the Day - VCR

VHS tapes were quickly going out of style at all the video rental stores near me.
My television had a built-in VCR, though, so I snapped up tons of tapes for ¥100 each!
I wish I had taken a photo of the whole collection!

Shinagawa in 1967

I came across some photos on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government website (yeah, don't even ask) and couldn't resist sharing. Love, love, love seeing the vintage city!

Shinagawa shinkansen tracks and streetcar, 1967

Check out the comparison here!

Japanese High Schools in the Modern Age

The genkan area.

High school in Japan is so very different from Canada, and not just because I graduated more than ten years (!) ago. The two schools I attended as a teenager were technologically on the cutting edge, and we had a beautiful computer lab where I used to check my email at lunch every day (Yes - it was 1999!), a media room and a modern cafeteria, and LCD displays in the halls so students could read the daily school news. As a student, I learned Microsoft PowerPoint by helping my friend with the daily media broadcast. Of course, students of the 2000s would be hardly shocked by such a level of tech, but for those of us who grew up without Internet-connected computers at home or cell phones, it was the height of modernity.

Japan was a bit of a nudge backward after my arrive in the mid-2000s. I remember my dismay when I took the tour of my school and realized there was no public computer lab, and just two general-use Windows XP laptops for the English department to share between 20 teachers. As an expat excited to document her adventures, and soon enough struggling with homesickness, the Internet had become my lifeline. I needed access. (This was after WiFi hotspots became a thing in Japan, but before they were affordable.) Luckily, the department kept one of the general-use computers on the desk next to mine, so I could pull it over and use it whenever I wanted. Which...was a lot, given that there wasn't a lot of prep work for me to do when the students were on vacation. I spent quite a lot of time on Wikipedia, Canadian news websites, and eventually, teaching myself the sport of basketball from the ground up. One day I came to school and, bless whoever in the IT department allowed this, discovered that laptop had moved permanently to my desk, and a new third one sat in its former home on the public desk. My JTE, my lifeline, had arranged for it.

The department's general-use computers, scanner and printer

My neighbours occasionally indicated that they thought I was a little unsociable, and I realize now that this was a gentle hint, but my sanity was spared. Sorry, everyone.

Anyway, at my school, things worked much like they did when I was in elementary and junior high back home. Most of the time, this was just fine by me; it's not a criticism. We used overhead projectors, analog clocks. 

My biggest problem was, bar none, the lack of insulation and heating. Mind you, this was not an issue unique to school; I battled frozen extremities at home, in the train station, and really most other places as well. I was shocked how unaffected my co-workers and students seemed to be by the temperatures that totally immobilized me! To stave off the cold, I had an enormous gas stove in my classroom, which needed to be hooked up to the gas outlet in the wall and turned on a minimum of twenty minutes before the lesson. On days when my prep work took me right to the bell, myself and the students could hardly function for the first half of the lesson, so I often spent entire mornings in my classroom, reading books and breathing gas because I truly felt it was better to tolerate a gas migraine than be so cold. In the staff room, my desk was also by the window, which we kept open year-round so that the air could circulate...even in February, that window was always open. 

The school was built in the 1960s, and had a definite 60s feel to it that I loved. There was a staff photo pinned to the cabinet behind where I sat that was dated the year Heisei 6 or so (1994: 2012 is Heisei 24) and showed the school exterior painted a vibrant hospital green. We had a chalkboard in the English department that had the names and addresses of JETs long, long gone written there - I wish I had taken a photo of this before I left. My phone number was written there for years, and might even still be, since it had been handed down year after year with the apartment. I was always on the lookout for 'vintage' things at home and away, and school occasionally delivered. I loved the sign in our lounge citing the rules, dated 1984, that hadn't faded or yellowed a bit.

I thought much of the charm in my school lay in its history and when I visited Emily's OO N High School on multiple occasions, a building not even 5 years old, I knew I preferred ours, even though she had air conditioning and heat in the staff room!

A familiar hallway

This entry has turned into a bit of a ramble, but when I think about how high school here in Canada must have evolved since I graduated (I hear my alma mater now auto-emails parents whose children have not shown up for school, and all papers submitted must be typed rather than handwritten) I'm glad that Japan wasn't a shock for me in this way. My students didn't work up any fancy Photoshop projects, and they handed all their homework in hand-written. I kept my grades in a register book, not on my computer. The kids all had cell phones, but rarely did I see any other technology in class - sometimes someone would have an iPod tucked into their blazer as they left, and there was a huge hubbub over a student who got an iPhone when it first launched, but lunchtime was usually for socializing with friends! I knew by name the only girl who brought her Nintendo DS with her to school every day, because she once asked me to bring mine so that we could play together.

Maybe the reason was because the prefecture couldn't afford fancy computers and LCD screens, but I prefer to think they were subscribing to the "we got along perfectly well without those things up until now, so why does it matter?" logic. I'm no technophobe, but I found it refreshing that my school was so down to earth. Even though we have had all these great advancements in tech that have become ubiquitous in the west, they are sometimes still seen as distractions in Japan. In my school, and I suspect this was true of many Japanese schools, we kept things simple. We had rocks, and we liked 'em! 

And when I was your age, I walked 4876234 miles in the snow to school, barefoot and uphill both ways...

JET in the 1990s

Showa Retro soft drinks

I'll admit that I'm a fan of all things retro, and I love learning about 1960s/70s/80s/90s culture even here at home. That's probably why I so enjoy comparing it to those decades in Japan. Max Danger is a favourite because it is so very bubble-economy 80s in its presentation, and I love that. I've also done my fair share of watching/reading about the 1964 Summer Olympics and the evolution of Tokyo street fashion.

Beppu, Oita

It's easy to find clinical, historical information about Japan in that time period, if you know the right places to look. Much more difficult to find  are realistic, personal accounts of those years, written not by businessmen or historians but by real people who lived and worked in the Japan outside of Tokyo. One such goldmine I have come across is nipponDAZE, the blog of two JETs living in Oita, Kyushu from 1989-1991. (The JET Programme officially began in 1987.) They worked at a local school and one brought her son to Japan - it's pretty rare for JETs to come with children nowadays, so I thought that was interesting and great. I found the blog by chance while looking for Oita information, as I had the good fortune to visit and fall in love with Beppu in 2010. The photos and stories of these JETs, who took the effort to upload their journals from that time, are a fantastic window into what it was like to be a JET in the earliest days of the programme.