Walking Tour of Osaka

We’ve now been in Japan for two weeks, and this last week we have walked 163,000 steps which is 102km, and climbed 133 flights of stairs. That’s further than last week, but mercifully not as many stairs.

And I’ve told you about our heated toilets, but not that many of them have a very nifty system where there is a hand basin built into the top of the cistern so you can wash your hands in the water that is refilling for next time. There’s a picture below.

It also seems that every train station has a different song that they play when the train is approaching. None of them are Japanese songs. Today we’ve had “I’ve been working on the railroad”, and “Humpty Dumpty”. Yesterday it was “Comin thro the Rye”.

Hasn’t actually stopped us taking trains, so this morning, we hopped on the metro and went to the Museum of Housing and Living, which seems a very dry topic, but was actually very interesting. They have converted a whole floor in a high-rise building into an indoor museum, and have constructed a full-size village complete with individual houses, shops, pharmacist, warehouse, community hall, kimono shop, community well and community toilet for you to wander through. Only half the number of buildings that would normally comprise a neighbourhood, but they are all full sized and fully kitted out.

They project the time of day on the roof, so some of the time the sun is out but other times you get a thunderstorm , or sunset, and then the moon comes out for a while so you are wondering around the museum in semidarkness.

On a different floor was a number of exhibits and photographs about the development of modern day Osaka.

We headed off to the Namba station where we paused for lunch at an underground café, then emerged into the daylight to take a free walking tour of the main Osaka sites. Some of it we’d seen yesterday, but it was good to have an explanation from a local. Walked through numbers of markets, down the canal, and talked about the history of the city, the culture, the food, and especially why they were better than Tokyo.

Our guide did say that the most asked question is why there are no rubbish bins around Japan – a cruel trick in the country plagued with vending machines and 4 layers of packaging. The reason is that in 1995 there was a terrorist attack when people put Sarin in some Tokyo underground railway rubbish bins, and thousands of people were killed and injured. In response, the authorities removed all rubbish bins, and now Japanese people take their rubbish home with them. To reduce the waste, they also removed paper towels from public toilets, so everybody carries a very small towel around with them.

Mandy had been hanging out for a special meal of okonomiyaki which is an Osaka specialty. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought about the fact that in Osaka they cook okonomiyaki at your table rather than in the kitchen, so it requires a special type of hotplate on your table, and these are not available in every restaurant. That means that you have to make a reservation at an okonomiyaki restaurant, and we hadn’t. Instead, we had dinner of gyoza and spring rolls, followed by specialty donuts at the shop next-door. What a shame.