Japan 2025 Tour: Day 2 Getting my bearings in Osaka

Burial mount of Emperor Nintoku

 

By the numbers

Temp: Around 32+ degrees

29,576 steps

23.09kms

 

Chaos Level: Looking for trains at the right station, but wrong train company

 

Sake at dinner

I would have to say I slept really well and woke refreshed. Had to turn the aircon back on during the night as it started to get warm with nothing open. I do have a window, but I don’t open it as I am near a road. I havnt heard any road noise with the window shut at all. The plan for today is to get the train out to see the tomb of Emperor Nintoku, which is a huge tomb that includes others that are nearby too. That was the plan anyway, but my plans don’t always work out at times.

 

Kitty at the art museum

My biggest mistake that I really made was not paying 100% attention to the train station that I had to go to. As I had said yesterday there is the public JR Namba station, the Nankai station, Kintetsu station and Namba metro station all in the same area within walking distance. The kicker is you cannot leave from the same station, so you have to go to another station. I spent half hour getting annoyed and wondering where this Nankai express train was and I was actually at the Kintetsu station. Each train that left I could not find until I asked and it didn’t twig I was in the wrong area. I ended up travelling one station and catching the metro back to Namba and get to the Nankai station. Once I had realised my error I was alright and back on track.

 

I ended up on the train that takes me out to the Kofun and realised once I had gotten off the train that there were smaller ones in the area and I checked out the burial mounds. They were from a few different time periods and the main one that I wanted to see was the burial tomb of Emperor Nintoku, which is something like a keyhole mound with a moat and several football fields in length. It was impressive and I could also feel the heat. I did end up in the nearby information centre about the tombs and they had drone footage of all the mounds from the air just to show how big they were. Many dwarfed the nearby buildings and vehicles on the road too. Across the road were two smaller Kofun and they had been heritage listed in the last 10 or so years, which I found interesting as the bigger one had been heritage listed not long after WW2. I was going to walk more of the park, but decided that I should head back to the city as I had enough of the sun and wanted to look at the exhibition that I wanted to see.

 

I ended up back at Namba station where I found the Metro was packed full of people, but I was happy to head towards an island known as Nakanoshima. I had somehow popped out of a random exit and bought lunch as I was a bit hungry and needed food. I thought where I needed to go was near the rose gardens, but it was actually in the opposite direction at least 10 mins, so I walked to the art museum really starting to feel the heat. I wanted somewhere cool to stay for a while and I ended up in the art museum to see the exhibition about the Capcom games. The computer game company designed games like Street Fighter, Resident Evil and quite a few others that I had not seen before. The exhibition showed the art behind the games to the point where they used the latest technology to create realistic images as in create a real jacket and then scan it from every possible angle. They showed how they got the fighting sequence worked out when the character hit another. It was actually interesting and cooled me off before I left to go back to the hotel, where I was going to have a rest before heading on my tour for that night.

 

After a brief rest and a shower, I went on a night tour of Osaka back streets, which turned out to be interesting as there are some areas in the city that are known to taint someone’s life if they live there. To the point where you might not be hired to work in a company due to your address and even your name as you could be a descendant of a slave. This was apparently outlawed, but does still happen and no one would touch the house if the occupant passes away as no one want to be associated with is due to it being the gift that you don’t want. Did learn that there is a homeless population and they are all in a certain area, but you may not know who they are as they are well dressed. There is a huge issue there and many are there because they want to be as they just vanish from society. It was interesting walking around these areas and even the red light area, but there were some rules, men and women from our group had to walk separately and the tour guide had to not go with us as he was recognisable to the ‘interesting gentlemen’  aka Yakuza. You don’t take photos or else your phone is destroyed. Apparently the rule is.. They negotiate what you want to do for a price and the lady takes you upstairs. She serves you a drink and something to eat where you madly fall in love for around 10 mins and then you leave. One leaving you get a lollypop that signifies that he had been shopping. The walk was interesting to say the least and they waved and I waved, but didn’t go inside the entrances. There is as I would say complex issues in Japan that are interesting and how they go about ignoring them or seeing things another way. The end of the tour we ended up at a restaurant where we tried some different foods and even had Sake with the people in the group. Along the walk we did see one of the local shopping districts that included one of the local towers, where you get a view of the lower part of Osaka. We did have Yakatori, which is fried Octopus and we did know that this was really hot when served so were careful. It was funny as there was an Aussie lady from Noosa who was on her last night in Japan and her friend turned up and was from Brisbane. Kinda funny the one night I meet up with two Aussies.