Osaka I · on the way

Getting in

My wife and I have been traveling to Japan for more than a decade, and somehow, even though we’ve come very close, we’ve never spent much time in Osaka. Earlier this year, we changed that.

We gathered the children and jumped on the ZIPAIR flight that leaves San Francisco in midday and arrives at Narita Airport in the evening. Just like our trip last year to Kanazawa, we stayed in the Hotel Nikko Narita, which is a few minutes away via shuttle.

This time, we avoided a mistake we made last year. Instead of my in-laws meeting us at Narita and all of us taking multiple expensive trains to Tokyo and then to our destination, we flew early the next morning to Osaka and met them there.

Once we’d all convened, we took the Rapi:t into the city. I had wanted to ride it ever since I first spotted it years ago, just as the pandemic was starting to ramp up, and I was taking a very convoluted path back home to the state.

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This train was designed around a retro-future concept, and feels postmodern, both inside and out. The name, like a lot of things in Japan’s world of trains, came from a public naming contest, and is meant to match the speed and convenience of an airport express train.

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It was designed by Hiroyuki Wakabayashi, a Kyoto-born product designer and architect who had just passed away the month before we were there. He’s well known for Keihan Railway’s Uji Station, and for several other buildings that come from the same aesthetic world.

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The children were enthralled, and I could see why. Riding any form of transportation is a joy for children, and even more so with this one. It looks like a mecha robot had been stretched out and placed on a track.

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Street level

At street level, Osaka immediately felt different than the other cities I visited. The pace and the noise felt slower, louder and more informal. I could see strangers chatting with each other, people making more eye contact. Tokyo felt quieter, much more reserved, and all the interactions between people felt far more transactional.

The way Tokyo is a center of culture and politics and money, and Kyoto is the center of traditional culture, Osaka is a merchant city built on canals and trade.

We went to Dotonbori, where Osaka’s signage was on full display. Several restaurants advertised their cuisine with giant crabs and octopi above their doors.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/16 · 1/15 · ISO 100

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/100 · ISO 100

We of course saw the famous running Glico man towering above the canal. Tokyo’s neon, especially around Ginza, is denser and brand and text-heavy, a bit more high-end, whereas Osaka’s was more cartoony and colorful.

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There are also quite a few bicyclists on the streets. In most places in Tokyo, the bicyclists seem quite sparse, but Osaka had many almost everywhere we went.

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All of these differences are not much of a surprise once I started to see how the city was laid out. The core of Tokyo was built on a chaotic, maze-like layout to confuse potential assailants.

Osaka, on the other hand, was built on a rectilinear grid to improve the efficiency of local merchants.

Of course, Osaka was bombed to rubble just like Tokyo. So, all this early city planning remained legible in the street grid. We rarely came across buildings more than several decades old.

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When I was in Tokyo, I quickly noticed that the city is rail-oriented with a lot of vertical density. Every single big station, such as Shibuya or Shinjuku, is surrounded by massive office towers, multi-floor shopping, and plenty of ways to get from one station to another.

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Osaka felt horizontal with Shōtengai shopping arcades instead of the newer shopping malls, some of them build directly on top of filled in canals. Even though some canals were filled in, there were still plenty to to be seen, such as in Dotonbori. Many of them follow straight paths, matching the street grid perfectly.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/400 · ISO 100

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/2000 · ISO 100

In most other Japanese cities, I was used to seeing rivers and moats that snaked along natural paths through the city grid.

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So while Tokyo read very polished and quiet, Osaka felt a bit more chaotic and warm. And of course, there was a lot of street food out on the major thoroughfares, whereas in Tokyo, I’d only see those in specific places like tourist spots. People had told me that Osaka was the stomach of Japan, while Tokyo was the brain, and we could see that in full display.

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There are also some interesting quirks about Osaka. The biggest was that in Tokyo, people stand on the left on escalators, which makes sense given that people also drive on the left. But surprisingly, in Osaka, people stand on the right.

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Overall, Osaka feels, at a street level, just like everything I’ve read about it. And plenty of my favorite brands, which I’ll talk about in a future issue, all find their origins in Osaka.

Homebase Tsuruhashi

As for our home base, my wife found a pleasant single-family home situated on a quiet street, walking distance from Tsuruhashi Station, Osaka’s Korea town.

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One night, we had dinner at a Korean restaurant nearby and were treated extremely well by the staff. They were so happy to see us with children eating authentic Korean food. And aside from providing us freebies on the house, they, with the help of a translation app, customized a lot of the dishes to suit our liking.

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And then right after we had dinner, we walked out into the Tsuruhashi market, where the restaurant was housed, and saw firsthand how interesting a place like this can be. Right above our heads, almost low enough that we could jump up and touch it, were subway tracks with trains whizzing past. Of course, that sort of construction is completely against code and wouldn’t be allowed these days.

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But, that’s what makes this neighborhood so interesting. It harkens back to an older side of Japan that probably existed in most other cities, but doesn’t anymore because of constant renewal, renovation, and updating that the Japanese are so well known for. And instead of the normal smells and the sounds that we were used to in other busy markets, we smelled kimchi and grilled meats, and heard the sounds of people speaking quite a few different languages.

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This market spontaneously emerged in this area following World War II. What had happened was that over the years, merchants and small business owners, many of Korean descent, built out little stalls and buildings haphazardly in this black market. And over time, this improvised street pattern started to solidify. That’s why it lacks the rectilinear grid that most other places in Osaka are known for.

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Roofs were retrofitted on top, just like in many other walking streets. Since this one lacks any sort of large boulevard or central plaza, parts of it can feel dungeon-like.

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The history of the Korean people in the area goes even further back to Japanase Colonial rule when Korean laborers were brought in to dig canals and work in factories.

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We were taken aback as we walked the labyrinth-like market streets. We’d seen places like this in other countries, but never in Japan. Though it lacked the careful organization the country is known for, it felt alive and human.

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This charming, bustling market, and the quiet side streets off of it, made for the perfect home base. Of course, one big benefit was that this area was also just a mile or so away from Osaka Castle, which was the perfect place for my usual morning runs.

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In future installments of this series, I’ll explore some of the cultural institutions that we spent time in, and the tours of Japanese industry that we saw. I know that Osaka doesn’t require my endorsement for anyone to visit. But I can tell you that this trip has shown me that I was wrong to have overlooked it all along.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/50 · ISO 500