Umeda

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The Hikari Tokaido Shinkansen is the bullet train that we’re getting on. We are headed for Osaka, with many stops along the way. I don't know how many stops there are going to be because quite frankly, I haven’t looked it up, nor do I intend to. Who cares really, we’re not in a hurry, we are in vacay mode. Before we checked out of our hotel room at noon we took the opportunity to go to the Pokemon Center retail shop and perhaps get a table at the Pokemon Cafe Tokyo for lunch. The place was just around the corner from our hotel, in the Nihonbashi district’s huge Takashimaya department store, in a tall building across the street from where the two original Takashimaya shopping centers with its magnificent early twentieth century architecture are located. Now here lies a couple of issues for me; Nihonbashi vs. Nihombashi is one, and the other is the location of our hotel. Are we in Nihonbashi, Nihombashi, whatever, or are we in Yaesu? This is very troublesome for me. When I tell my friends and relatives back home what a wonderful time we had in Japan, they will undoubtedly ask me where we stayed at in Tokyo, in what hotel and which neighborhood or famous tourist spot. I have been writing this whole time about Yaesu and all the fascination with discovering something new, so this whole Nihonbashi business puts a bit of a wrinkle in my narrative. To be quite frank, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s called Nihonbashi or Nihombashi. They’re all the same according to the Japanese folks, and it’s written arbitrarily either way in the latinized version. The thing that really matters I suppose are the Japanese characters, written of this here Kanji characters 日本橋. The first two characters are pronounced either as Nihon, Nihom, Nippon, or whichever one rolls off conveniently to the Japanese tongue. Many westerners are familiar with this Nippon business, but less so for Nihon and Nihom. How these transliterations in the original Kanji characters themselves ever evolve into the name of a country that we now call Japan in the romanized version is beyond me.

Our hotel is called Karaksa Hotel Colors Tokyo Yaesu. It literally says this at the front door, so I had assumed all along that we were in the Yaesu district. In fact, the hotel is actually located in the Nihonbashi district. Knowing that drove me up the wall. Why the heck would you even include Yaesu as part of the district branch subname when it’s really in Nihonbashi? Earlier in our journey to this here wonderful world that we now call Japan, we walked a few blocks from the north Marunouchi Exit of the Tokyo Station to the Karaksa Hotel at Tokyo Station, which we were told was the wrong hotel by one of the front lobby staff because our confirmation code showed that we were booked in the Colors Yaesu hotel. Well it turns out that the Karaksa Hotel at Tokyo Station is actually located in the Yaesu district while the Colors Yaesu hotel is located not in Yaesu, but in the Nihonbashi district. So that’s how confusing this whole affair was, and if you were to write me a letter and address it as being in Yaesu instead of Nihonbashi, that letter would never arrive. In any case, I would not advise any of you folks out there, the many of you dedicated and astute followers of my critically acclaimed and award winning travelogue blog that’s admired by the world over, to write me a letter that’s addressed to my hotel in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, Japan because trying writing that address might be just a tad bit confounding for you.

The Pokemon Center was an enjoyable experience for my daughter because she loves these sorts of things. To be quite honest with you these things are incomprehensible to me. I don’t know a Pokemon from a milkman, a mailman even, since milkmen don’t really exist anymore. Perhaps someday all mailmen will be gone too, extinct, the job of delivering mail being a relic as the mail itself. But this anime deal is a whole nother animal altogether. They came from Japan obviously but how Japan has exported the fascination with these characters to the rest of the world in god’s green earth is the most interesting part, at least to me. Kids and young adults all over the dadgum corner of this here planet earth that we all live in and love so very, very much so help us god amen are dressing up as one of their anime or Pokemon characters, going to comic fairs and conventions, or even to just dress up like an anime character and go to one of these Japantowns still in existence in the states. There were no kids, young adults, or just plain old adults for that matter wearing customs of their favorite Pokemon character at this here center however. But there were lots of folks, tourists, lining up outside of the Takashimaya department store waiting for the Pokemon Center to open at 11 am. When we finally got up to the fifth floor after the store opened, there were even more people lining up outside of the Pokemon Cafe. When we asked how long the wait would be they told us you need a reservation to get in, no walk-ins. Well that was a big disappointment to my daughter, so we had to make it up to her by buying her a nice big stuffed animal of the character called Pikachu. It obviously is a famous Pokemon character but I had no clue. I don’t even know what kind of animal this Pikachu is. It looks like a yellow rabbit to me, but it’s not furry like a rabbit. It ain’t no mouse neither like Mickey. Perhaps it’s some sort of rodent, but not really a real animal, just a made up version of an animal that looks a bit like Speedy Gonzalez or the mouse in Tom and Jerry, whichever one was the mouse, I can never remember.

We checked out of our hotel at noon exactly and started walking with our luggage in tow to the Tokyo Station. It is again another partly sunny day with temperatures in the high eighties fahrenheit. The summers in Japan tend to be hot, muggy, and sticky because it is also the rainy season. It rains a lot but it’s hot, which I seldom get to experience. I wouldn’t be surprised either if I haven’t experienced it before because quite frankly, I can’t remember if I ever did. We were hungry and we needed something to eat that’s fast, so my lovely daughter suggested McDonalds, and my wife and I were all in. This isn’t the first time we ate at McDonalds in Japan. We've been to three McDonalds since we arrived in Tokyo a few days ago. I understand that they have to cater to the locals in order to make money, so the menu we’re left with is not only different, but limited. You can’t get a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder, which is fine because the hamburger version they had tastes just like a Quarter Pounder, at least to me. I have tried the other items on the menu before a long time ago, but I didn’t like it then, and I don’t think I’m going to like it now, so I opted for the cheeseburger they had on the menu, whatever it’s called. Like I said, it tasted just like a Quarter Pounder. My daughter, however, chose the Teriyaki burger, a very mature choice in my opinion. I don’t know many American kids who would do that.

We were on the Hikari 513 Shinkansen that’s bound for Shin-Osaka.

“What’s the difference between Osaka and Shin-Osaka?” asked my wife.

“Who cares, it’s just a name,” I glibly replied.

That was not a good answer nor a good omen, to not care about the name of the station of your destination. Shin-Osaka Station is not the same as Osaka Station. Our hotel is near Osaka Station, but more on that later.

At 1:03 pm on Friday, June 16th on the year of our lord two thousand and twenty three, our Osaka bound Shinkansen departed Tokyo Station. These trains look like bullets painted in white with smooth cornered square windows spaced so uniformly like a perforated dot matrix printer paper. There are thick and thin blue outlines that run along its sides at just below the window level, touching every carriage from one end of the sharp bullet nose to the other end. We had reservations at the front end of carriage 10. There’s a stowage area with combination locks at the back end of the carriage that you can use for your oversized luggage. This Shinkansen might be fast, but this Hikari deal has many stops, so the thought of a quick ride to Osaka evaporated rather quickly ten minutes later at our first stop, the Shinagawa Station in Tokyo. Even though it’s called Shinagawa Station, it isn’t actually located in Shinagawa City. It’s located further up north of Shinagawa City near its border with Minato City, another one of those wonderful wards of the Tokyo metropolis. When we left Tokyo Station the seats in front and behind us were empty. When we left Shinagawa Station, they were filled. The folks in front of us were Japanese. The folks behind were gaijin tourists. I looked out of our port hole and saw just the platform with passengers either waiting to board or just getting off one of the JR trains. I could not form an opinion on Shinagawa Station without having walked around it for a look-see, because I didn’t really see anything that’s worth writing about from inside the shinkansen, so that’s how exciting that first stop was.

A female voice over the PA system tells us that we are bound for Shin-Osaka, which alternates back to Japanese in that same female voice, always ending with the word mas. It is usually written with the letter u at the end, like wakarimasu, but I reckon that part of it is silent, just like the p in psychology. The train is fast and smooth with just a tiny hint of vibration. You can go to the bathroom and pee or poop comfortably knowing that it won’t be such a mess with the train carriage bouncing all over the dadgum place. There’s enough leg space in front of us to stretch our legs out, and the seats recline down almost forty-five degrees from its upright position. The carriage was only half full after we left Shinagawa Station, but I suspected that it would get filled up later on, so I advised my daughter that she can roam around and sit wherever there’s an open seat, but be warned that she may get kicked out when the passenger who reserved that seat comes aboard. Shinagawa Station is our last stop in the Tokyo metropolis. We zip by other JR trains bound for Shibuya, Yokosuka, Ueno, or some other far flung destinations east, west, north or south with an ever changing background of tall commercial and residential buildings, elevated highways, byways, underpasses, parks, schools, Christian churches, tennis courts, basketball courts, soccer fields, and Buddhist temples, with all the signage in Japanese kanji and English subtitles in some cases. This is what Japan is all about. It’s exotic at its prime. I have always loved the orient because of this. If it was just like home or Europe, my wife, daughter and I would not be here. This is the reason we travel, for the sheer thrill of exoticism. As we cross the bridge over the Meguro River, trains on the Yamanote line veer to the right while we swerve to the left at the fork on the railways. It didn’t take long for us to reach the Shin-Yokohama station because it’s not that far away, I think, although I don’t know how far because quite frankly, it doesn’t matter to me.

I have no interest in Yokohama. It looks somewhat industrial to my untrained eyes. Perhaps my opinion has been influenced by the very fact that the city is the namesake of a tire company that’s well known throughout the whole wide world on god’s green earth. I mean when you bring up the city of Yokohama, the first thing that comes to people's minds is Yokohama Tires. If you bring up Kawasaki, many people think of motorcycles. In many cases we do associate Japanese cities with the popular products that they produce. There is a Toyota City in Japan, but the real name of the founder of the Toyota Motor Company is actually Toyoda. Now, since many of you out there in the travelogue universe who follow my critically acclaimed and award winning travelogue blog that’s renowned the world over are an astute and intelligent bunch of aficionados, y’all understand that Toyota and Toyoda are the same dadgum place and thing. As I’ve alluded to in my previous award winning travelogue blog, the romanized transliteration of a kanji character has no real meaning in terms of how you write or say a place, thing, or event. A Toyoda and a Toyota are the same dadgum thing unless when it comes to marketing. I won’t bother to explain. I’ll let Toyoda-san explain it himself. This comes directly from their company website.

“The word "Toyoda" uses ten Japanese strokes to write while "Toyota" uses only eight. Eight is considered a lucky number in Japanese culture. For these reasons "Toyota" was chosen as the company's name.”

As I expected, our carriage is now ninety percent full. The reason it’s not one hundred percent is because many passengers are singles or couples traveling together, and rarely travel in three like us. The seats in these trains are configured with three seats on the left side of the aisle and two on the right. Now, each row in our carriage on the left is occupied by at least two people, sometimes three. The same for the right side, each row is occupied by at least a single passenger. It would be odd to sit next to a passenger that you are not traveling with, so my daughter can no longer roam around freely and sit wherever she wants, and I pity her lack of freedom as a child, but it doesn’t bother her one bit. I love that about her, she’s cool about everything. My wife thought I was silly for worrying about her emotional health just because she now has to sit with us instead of somewhere else. I think she’s got a point.

I was already half asleep by the time we left the Shin-Yokohama station. I reclined and stretched out my legs. My wife and daughter were probably on their Samsung Galaxy phone and iPad each, using the free wifi available on the JR East network for passengers, which I suppose will become JR West when we get to Osaka. From here we head southwest towards the coast on the island of Honshu. We crossed the Kanagawa-Tokyo prefecture border while I was napping and dreaming of a traditional tea ceremony with a geisha in Kyoto, I think. No one will ever know what time of day it is while they’re napping. All they will know is unconsciousness. I mean, all I really know is what I’ve reconstructed after the fact. I know that we left Shin-Yokohama around 1:21 pm or so. When I woke up from my nap, we were already in a city called Mishima at a quarter to two. So that’s about a twenty minute nap that covered about fifty miles. I had wanted to see the coastal cities of Odawara, Manazuru, Yugawara, and Atami, but I missed them all. I did not see the coast, not even sniff it, no views of rolling waves breaking off a distant reef from the beach in Atami. Instead I was woken up by my daughter’s laughter, clapping, and raising of her hand in victory and applause for some youtube video showing some anime monster killers of some sort. I have no idea why she loves these things. It’s incomprehensible to me. You can usually see Mount Fuji and Mount Hakone from the Mishima Station, but today was a bit cloudy, so only a small part of Mount Fuji can be seen, and none of Mount Hakone. We’ve all heard of Mount Fuji, the foreign tourists of this here great land of the rising sun. I personally had not heard of Mount Hakone until the minute I looked out of the port hole on my way to the bathroom and saw dark clouds covering it. A gaijin behind me said something to the effect of,

“Not good weather to see Mount Hackoenay,” said he.

“What's Mount Hackoenay?” asked I.

“The volcano behind the clouds,” the gaijin tourist responded.

“So is that Mount Fuji,” said I pointing to the half-covered volcano far away.

“Yeah, that’s Mount Fuji,” he said.

I went to the bathroom after he said that, leaving him to contemplate the beauty of Mount Fuji all by his lonesome while I pee. When I finished and walked back to my seat the gaijin was still looking out of the port hole contemplating the beauty of Mount Fuji. I looked up Mount Hackoenay on my iPhone, spelled it just like the way he said, but there were no results of that name. How the heck would I know how to spell the dadgum thing. So I added Japan next to Mount Hackoenay in my search and viola, there it is, a Mount Hakone in Japan in the Kanagawa prefecture. It’s a non-active volcano, the last eruption being thousands of years ago before humankind existed on this here planet earth. Other search results were essentially advertisements for tourism, places to see and do, tour guides, best restaurants to grab something to eat in the area, and very little about its history and why it doesn’t get much publicity compared to Mount Fuji. I suppose Mount Fuji is more beautiful to look at than Mount Hakone, but I wouldn’t know for sure because I never saw it on account that it was covered in clouds. Mount Fuji on the other hand was majestic even from the little that I saw of it. The tip and half of its wide brimmed body were the only visible part today, but it was enough to conjure images of an active volcano that’s ready to erupt at any time she feels like erupting.

We left Mishima and twenty minutes later we arrived in Shizuoka, a city with the same name as the prefecture that it’s located in. Some passengers got off, but most stayed in for the long haul to Shin-Osaka. Shizuoka is located on the coast in Suruga Bay. I can see the wide open seas from the train station. Its color is blue-green-aquamarine, a combination of colors that evoke a sense of a littoral environment bordering on a deep ocean shelf. It’s a calming sight amid an urban setting that not many tourists in Japan get to see. But then the shinkansen had to move on, so that just about killed the calming presence of the ocean as we speeded along the way to our next stop, Hamamatsu. The Tokaido Shinkansen is named as such because it runs along the eastern sea route in Japan. This is what I was told. Places that we stopped along the way so far were also major stops during what’s called the Edo period in Japan’s history. This was the period when they paved a path from Edo, which is now Tokyo, to Osaka and other places west of Japan, making the modern day Tokyo as we know it today the center of power. It is also the period where our old friend Yaesu, Yan Yuseten as the Japanese originally called him because his Dutch name was just too doggone long and hard to pronounce for the Japanese, and the famous gaijin samurai William Adams, became advisers to the Shogunate of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Now, I don’t know much about Japanese history, but many of us westerners and foreign tourists have probably been exposed to this period of Japan from all the samurai movies that we’ve seen because this is when the samurai ruled. Perhaps because of their autocratic rule, Japan was able to stabilize itself from the chaos of feudalism and became a productive and progressive modern society. They kicked out the Spanish and Portuguese but opened up to the Dutch partly because of William Adams and Yan Yuseten, also known as Yaesu. I started to write about the Tokugawa Ieyasu and the Edo period but before I could even formulate a thought about it we arrived in Hamamatsu. A Suzuki Motorcycle manufacturing plant is close by. Perhaps their company headquarter is also in the city, but I don’t know that for sure, I am just guessing on account of the Suzuki plant I see down yonder. Maybe I’m wrong, but who cares. No one pays me to write the right stuff, so if I don’t know for sure I just guess and hope for the best. That’s how I roll with the written arts. I write what I think and consequences be damned. I have nothing interesting to write about Hamamatsu to be quite honest. I feel the same about Nagoya, the next stop after Hamamatsu. Nagoya feels like an industrial city to me, much like Yokohama and Kawasaki. They’re on the coast with a major port and lots of people populating the dadgum place, but what exactly do they have to offer an idiot tourist like me? I’m not here to buy a Lexus. I’m here to explore Japan and its culture, or something like that. But mostly I’m here in Japan for no other reason than I wanted to come here as an idiot tourist, acting like a doofus whenever I see something I don’t understand, and right now is one of those moments. I don’t understand Nagoya, and perhaps I never will understand it because what I see of Nagoya from inside the Shinkansen is very limited.

We left Nagoya shortly after 3 pm. More folks got off but less people came on board when we left, so the carriage is now only fifty percent full. My wife and daughter are now asleep. Since I have no one to talk to, I do what I usually do when boredom sets in. I dug out my little blue notebook and a Pilot G-2 pen with a 0.7mm ballpoint and started writing about things that happened in the moment that just passed. The shinkansen had just skirted through the Eastern coastline on Honshu Island that starts around the city of Odawara in the Kanagawa prefecture, the rails of the tracks going around the edge of Mount Hakone into Atami, crossing the neck of the Izu Peninsula to Mishima, then Shizuoka, and turning up northward at Hamamatsu to Nagoya. Along the way we passed underneath tunnels, crossed a bunch of rivers over a bridge, got a peek of Mount Fuji which was partly covered in clouds, had close encounters with other shinkansen heading eastward, and saw baseball stadiums, schools, farms, automobile plants, motorcycles plants, and lakes. Japan is a land that fascinates more than illuminates. This is especially true when it comes to the language. The Japanese language fascinates me but it’s not illuminating. There are Japanese words or kanji characters that show the meaning of the word and why it’s pronounced that way, but when you look it up in an English-Japanese dictionary, some things don’t quite connect. Take the word wakarimasu for example. It means to understand or I understand, whatever the case maybe. Quite frankly, I don’t understand the transliteration. It is written as such 分かります. Now the first character looks like a house, this guy 分. Looking up the tone of this character gives you the sound that comes off our tongue as bun. Obviously there ain’t no bun in wakarimasu, so how the heck did it get in there? Furthermore when you look up this character toned bun in the Japanese-English dictionary, the translation means minutes, which is quite confounding. Now the next character, か. The tone of this guy is ka, and the meaning is mosquito. Well you got me. I had no clue that ka means mosquito in Japanese. Moving along we have this character that looks like a cursive Y, り. What could that be? Its tone is Ri, so now we’re getting somewhere. Ka and Ri are the two intonations in wakarimasu. ま looks like a combination of the cursives L and F superimposed on top of each other. Its tone is Ma and its English translation is also Ma, as in Mama and Papa. Finally we have す, which has a tone su and an English translation of vinegar. It makes no sense but so be it. The English translation means very little, if nothing at all. It’s the characters themselves put together that has meaning. So now if we transliterate the characters together as one word what we get is bunkarimasu. But the word that means I understand is wakarimasu. So how come the character that looks like a house is inserted in there at the beginning and not the character for wa, which is written in Japanese as わ? Shouldn’t it be written like so わかります? I’m sure there’s an explanation somewhere, but I haven’t got the desire nor the energy to dig that up because quite frankly, it’s not all that important to me.

We arrived in Kyoto forty minutes after we left Nagoya. The train pretty much emptied out at Kyoto Station, with only three other groups of travelers staying on board including us. I woke up my wife and daughter to let them know that we are near Osaka and told both of them to get ready to get off the shinkansen because we will most likely arrive in ten to fifteen minutes. Kyoto will be one of the places that we will visit once we get settled in Osaka. Finally, we arrived at the Shin-Osaka Station, got off the train and headed for the exit. But before exiting my wife looked at our booking confirmation to find out where our hotel was located. Now earlier in our journey on the shinkansen she had asked what the difference was between Osaka Station and Shin-Osaka Station. I glibly replied that they were all the same, assuming they were both on the same general area, but on a different platform like they did at the Tokyo Station. Of course I was wrong. I was not even close. Our hotel is called Hotel Hankyu Respire Osaka, located in the Umeda district of Osaka. In order to get there you have to take another train that crosses over the Yodogawa river and get off at the Osaka Station. The distance is only two and a half miles and we could have easily taken a taxi to get there, but why bother when we are already in Shin-Osaka and could easily transfer via one of the JR trains that’s bound for Osaka Station. So we dragged our luggage in tow and looked for the platform that has a JR train to Osaka. It didn’t take that long because of Japan’s efficient railway system, which will always have a train coming or going within fifteen minutes of each other.

We arrived at Osaka Station within ten minutes from Shin-Osaka. It is an impressive looking station with a glass rooftop that spans over several railway tracks and platforms with lots of wide open spaces, retail shops, restaurants, and even a park at the rooftop. We exited out of the North Gate by taking the escalator going up, then crossed a bridge that’s elevated on the second level to connect to another building that houses a huge retail shop called Yodobashi Camera. It is a multi-story electronic retail outlet that’s probably four times the size of the old Fry’s Electronics that we used to shop at back in the early 2000 in the Bay Area. It’s funny that while the Fry’s of the world have disappeared, the Bic Cameras and Yodobashi Cameras in Japan are thriving and still going strong after all these years on Amazon domination. The Yodobashi Camera building is connected to another tall building that also houses our Hotel Hankyu Respire Osaka. We checked in by self service because that is supposedly how it’s done in this here wonderful Respire hotel. Once we arrived we promptly flopped in our beds and took a nap because we were too tired to do anything else.

An hour later we were up. It’s early in the evening, close to 7 pm, on a Friday night, and the Izakayas are hopping. Lots of working folks are out and about drinking and eating their favorite barbecued meats on a skewer, eating Ramen, or whatever the case maybe. There are lots of tourists as well because Osaka Station and the surrounding area is almost like a city within a city. Lots of cars and taxis buzzed by as we tried to cross the street to get to one building with an abundance of restaurants and retail shops. The problem is we don’t know what’s good or not, so we picked one Izakaya on the south building of the Grand Front Osaka twin towers. It was on the eighth floor, and when we got there a long line of people were standing by waiting to get a table. Izakayas are somewhat informal. They don’t take reservations, it’s on a first come first serve basis. We asked the hostess upfront how long the wait is and she said forty five minutes. We were too hungry to wait that long, so we went to look for other places on the eighth floor to see what else was available. There was none, so we took the elevator down and looked somewhere else. I asked my daughter what she wanted to eat. She said Ramen, so I searched for a good Ramen shop on my iPhone and found Ichiran Ramen tucked in between a big commercial building and the Osaka-Umeda train station just across from our hotel and off to the right, or east, of the Osaka Station. I love Ichiran, and so does my wife and daughter. We had Ichiran Ramen in Harajuku in Tokyo not long ago and in my opinion it is one of the best Ramen places in Japan. Their Tonkotsu broth is rich but not too salty. The flavor is perfect for my taste and exactly what I imagined a good Ramen should taste like in Japan. So here we were, eating Ramen in one of those cubicle type of arrangements on our first night in Osaka, enjoying the noodles and the broth, and drinking a nice cold draft of Sapporo. My daughter had water of course and my wife some hot tea. I reminded myself that once I get back to the states I’m going to order one of their Ramen packages on Amazon because it is that good.

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Photos

Rural Japan
A view from the Shinkansen

Osaka Station
Black Rain

Train stop
A train station in rural Japan

Mochi
This is mochi alley.

Japanese yellow taxi
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Umeda
The area around Osaka Station.