🇯🇵 Japan Trip 2026

Farewell to Kyoto

Busy morning packing and sorting our stuff out. Some of the clothes were still a bit damp and whiffy. Annoying. But we packed as best as possible, separating most of the damp stuff and vacuum packing. It wasn't too bad, but just a bit annoying. We ate breakfast in the hotel room. Cans of iced coffee, some melon pan and a crème caramel from the corner shop on our way home the previous night. Both of us availed of the massage chairs for a short while before checking out and heading for the station.

At the station we grabbed warm coffee and a pastry and then found our train platform. The Limited Express Thunderbird train would take us to Osaka-Shin station with a journey time of 20 minutes or so. Thunderbird.... yay!

Osaka Arrival

At Osaka-Shin station we had to change to the Midosuji line for another 20 minute ride on the metro to Namba station. Everything felt pretty calm until we got to our stop and exited. The station was chaotic with people heading in every possible direction. Outside the main station, but still underground, we found ourselves in an extensive shopping mall that extended in every direction. There seemed to be an entire city under ground here. Hmmm numbered exits. We tried to follow the numbering and work out where we needed to be, and found that we had walked way too far. Maria found us on a map and together we were able to work out that we needed to backtrack and choose one of two exits.

Whew, we emerged into daylight and discovered that the city was as bustling and busy above ground as it was under ground. A short 5 minute walk brought us to our hotel. Surprise!

We checked in to the Dotonbori Hotel. Nice, they had free coffee and soft-drinks through the day, evening free drinks, evening free ice-cream, and an "entertainment event" every evening. Free drinks and ice-cream was really a help-yourself affair. We availed of this plenty later during our stay.

As a quick lunch snack before we set out on our first Osaka adventure, we had a snack in the hotel room - eating the 5 pickles we had bought in Kyoto with rice crackers and edamame crackers that Ro bought at the 7-11 around the corner. We ate some of the cinnamon-wasabi biscuits as a dessert. Leaving the hotel we also had an isotonic water drink and cold oolong tea from the free hotel soft-drink machine. Then we stepped out into Dotonbori during the day time.

We planned to walk towards Tsutenkaku Tower, which was about 30-40 minutes walk away. We didn't have any big expectations around this, but just thought we would take in the neighbourhood and enjoy seeing the city. Dotonbori is full of 3d signage, food places, bars, dodgy-looking massage places, and people... really busy. I had a feeling the evening was going to get really chaotic. We ducked into an arcade to get out of the sun and to start heading south towards Tsutenkaku.

The streets go on endlessly in Osaka. And as we moved into more of a working class area, the style of the shops changed to more practical options, like furniture and department stores. However, we were struck by how many shops selling an infinite number of plastic capsules called Gachapon from these coin operated dispensers. Each capsule contains a collectible miniature toy in a hollow plastic egg. Like an infinity of these! The amount of plastic junk is really depressing. We also passed a lot of novelty 'maid cafes', where waitresses are dressed in cosplay maid outfits and treat their customers as 'masters'... kind of a 'hostess club' with a twist.

Tsutenkaku Tower Adventure

We walked through a bit of an arcade and suddenly there was the tower ahead of us.

Emblazoned across the base of it was 'Welcome to Osaka!'. We felt like we really had arrived.

Surrounding the tower is a neighbourhood, apparently modelled on Coney Island, in the US. There definitely is a bit of a circus or carnival feel to the place with all of the 3D signs and movement.

Maria got shouted at by an American woman while taking a photo in front of Tsutenkaku Tower... The streets were heaving and people were everywhere. The woman shouted: "There is the principle of a line!", suggesting that people were queuing up to take pictures. Of course, complete rubbish. After she had taken a picture of her husband, they left and nobody else was trying to get a picture there. Random.

Plenty more restaurants and places to buy ice-cream and bili-yaki, which are small warm cakes, usually filled with red-bean paste, and shaped in the shape of Billiken - the god of things that ought to be. More on Billiken in a bit, because it is everywhere in Osaka. We were deliberating whether to buy tickets to go up Tsutenkaku tower, so we decided to eat ice-cream and bili-yaki. Maria went for matcha ice-cream, while Ro went for more traditional strawberry. The bili-yaki were delicious, kind of similar to the taiyaki that we bought at Senso-ji temple in Tokyo.

While we were standing at the base of the tower, considering tickets, 3 fire engines pulled in and an ambulance parked alongside us. This didn't bode well for the tower. But it turned out that the emergency services were checking out a building alongside. We stood with the rest of the gathering crowd to watch events unfold. Fortunately, it seemed to be a false alarm, or it was something that got resolved very quickly, because the firemen all came back to the small fire engines laughing and chatting. And then they left as quickly as they had arrived.

Okay emergency services were in the area and seemed to think everything was safe. We decided to go up the tower. We paid for our tickets and caught the first elevator. As we queued for the elevator we heard a scream and suddenly a woman shot out of a steel tube alongside us. A group of her friends cheered as they filmed the tube. Ah! It seems that you can slide down a slide from the top of the tower for thrills. Nope... not for us, thank you.

After an elevator ride, we discovered ourselves in another arcade room, selling lots of tat, including a ton of gachopon. We were ushered to a photo booth with a giant plastic Billiken. Where we were told to pose for a photo. We didn't think we would buy the picture, but we literally turned the corner and they had printed it already with a nice memento sleeve and a download link and everything. Yup, we are suckers and we paid for the pic.

So a bit about Billiken, which is like an Osaka mascot, which appears everywhere. Ironically, it isn't a Japanese thing at all. Billiken was invented in the US by a Kansas City art teacher, who patented it as a charm doll in 1908. There was an idea that if you bought a Billiken doll, you would have good luck, but you would have even better luck if you were gifted one. Also, good luck for rubbing its belly or feet. A genius bit of capitalistic culture. The surprising thing is that Billiken was imported into Japan before WW2, and was enshrined as a foreign deity. The first Billiken appeared in the Tsutenkaku Tower when it was opened in 1912. The Billiken disappeared from Japanese culture in the late 1920s and through the war as Japan pushed back on foreign influence. But it came back in full force after the war as Japan fell increasingly under American influence. The Billiken at Tsutenkaku Tower is a 1980s replica of the original and is now considered one of the most famous statues of the Billiken. It made its way to Missouri on tour in 2008 to revisit the place of its origins. Mental.

There was another elevator up to the observatory deck on the tower. A cheesy screen in the elevator played an animation of the tower taking off into space. But it also gave useful information about the tower, including its height, which was an impressive 108 metres. It was designed to incorporate features of the Eiffel Tower, and was originally built in 1912. At the time of its original construction, it was the second tallest building in Asia, at 64 metres. During the war, it was disassembled after the building was damaged in a fire in 1943 and the steel was used in the war effort. After the war, the building was reconstructed and reopened in 1956.

From the observation deck, you get a pretty 360 degree panoramic view of the entirety of Osaka. It is really quite cool to walk around.

At one side of the observation deck is a narrow stairway that leads up to an external deck where you can walk around outside, protected by some fencing. Finally, there is a photo deck that extends out over the city. You take a ticket, scan the barcode and then you have 15 seconds to get into position for a photo. The photo is free and you get the link to download it with your barcode.

On the way out from the tower, there is a small museum along with some retro amusements and the obligatory gift shop. One thing that we found interesting here was the history of Glico, a famous Japanese caramel sweet - with the hidden secret ingredient which seemed to be reduced oysters. The sweet became famous as an energy sweet that could be used by athletes. The neon sign of the running Glico man is a famous photo point in Dotonbori, so we would look out for that later in the evening.

We exited the tower and decided to catch the metro back to Namba, where our hotel was located. Evening was coming soon, and we had an interesting plan to meet some friends for dinner.

Meeting Simon & Louise

So Ro has this paddling buddy, Simon, who he goes whitewater kayaking with back in the UK. By a very strange coincidence, just before we left for Japan, Simon and Ro were chatting and by sheer chance discovered that Simon and his wife, Louise had also booked to come to Japan and that by strange fate, our timing overlapped. We messaged a few times and agreed to meet in Dotonbori on a bridge in the evening, take a walk together and then have dinner together in Osaka. How wild?!!

However, back at the hotel, we weren't going to miss out on the free drinks and ice cream. In the hotel lobby, the "entertainment event" for the evening had kicked off. Today the event was Takoyaki - small octopus balls. Much as this is a major Japanese snack food, neither of us had any heart to eat octopus at all. So we doubled up on free ice-cream and freebie drinks. There was an interesting selection of wine, beer on tap, sake, shochu, and various cocktails etc. By the time we needed to get ready for dinner, we had already tried a fair bit of the available selection.

Good thing that we had taken the edge off the evening with a few aperitifs. We exited the hotel into the heaving nightlife of Dotonbori. Whew. This is really hard to describe. We went down to the river to go look for Simon and Louise. Oh my... this was going to get interesting!

As luck would have it, we walked right past Simon and Louise and they spotted us walking down along the riverside. They messaged and we waited for them to join us.

We went for a walk along the river and then back along the streets. This place is completely wild at night.

It is kind of impossible to capture this in pictures, but it is so insanely busy and you quickly become overloaded with sensory input just walking through the streets. It is buzzing with people and sadly, unlike most of the rest of our visit to Japan, the scale of human and particularly tourist activity has brought with it a fair bit of litter. Think of London's Soho, but scale it up several notches. This is Soho on Steroids.

And aside from the seedy looking massage parlours that line the streets, there are also the somewhat amusingly named restaurants... these two almost immediately outside of where our hotel was located.

We also passed a restaurant specialising in fugu - sushi made with the toxic puffer fish. Unfortunately, we had to see these poor live puffer fish in the tank outside. The fish were in terrible condition and all awaiting the chopping board. Some had tail rot, and others had sores and lesions on their bodies. We saw these the next evening and some of the fish looked different. They must have high turnover.

Dinner at Oko Vegan

Fortunately for us, we had picked Oko Vegan restaurant, which ironically wasn't entirely vegan and equally served chicken and other meat, so really the name is just for the fact that it has vegan options. That said, this was a very cool experience clearly aimed at much younger clientele. But it is awesome to relive your youth for a bit.

Oko is styled as a chaotic, graffiti heavy, takeout place. With lots of quirky things painted onto the walls.

The speciality of the house, after which the establishment is named, is okonomiyaki. This is kind of pancake thing with shredded cabbage as the core of the filling, but a variety of other fillings. The whole thing is very messy and we made the mistake of ordering large. There was more food than any of us could finish.

To order, you queue along a wall down a corridor to a little hatch, where Shiho - a young Japanese woman with a wild personality serves you. Everything feels pretty loud, fast, and chaotic.

Once you've got your food order, you help yourself to drinks... this is kind of an honesty box scenario with a bell to notify Shiho that you took a drink and put some money in the box. All a bit weird. Then you go upstairs and wait for Shiho to yell out your number. After that you can get down to eating... everything is foil wrapped and you pretty much dive right in. Messy, but delicious.

This definitely felt like somewhere I would have loved as the hippy student that I once was, so it was great to take my inner 20-year-old to a place like this. It speaks to our experience of Osaka, which was that it very definitely felt like a city that caters to the youth. Late night partying, drinking, clubbing, dancing, karaoke... we're getting too old for all that!

Late Night Promenade

After getting well fed, we took a more leisurely late night promenade along the river to take Simon and Louise back to their metro stop and to take in a bit more of the night-time scenery before hitting the sack.

There are loads of big buildings with billboards advertising host and hostess clubs. A big thing in Japan, with different hosts and hostesses competing for celebrity level fame. I took this picture of some slightly less impressive billboards after we said our goodbyes to Simon and Louise.

We weren't looking for hosts or hostesses, we had each other...

We decided to take a few back-roads towards the hotel, to avoid the madness and the crowds. We found a little Buddhist shrine down an alleyway. There was a Shinto shrine just around the corner. Hand-in-hand religious syncretism. These little spaces seem so out of place against the modernity and secularism of the night life just beyond. But when we got to this place, there was an elderly Japanese man praying at the Shinto shrine.

We noticed this set of Jazz bars that are stacked floor by floor within one building complex. Probably fairly unremarkable except for a few points. One was just that jazz seemed a bit out of place in the current space, so this intensified our interest, particularly since we both enjoy jazz music. But also, we noticed a cat sitting up on the building alongside, and it was staring up at the top floor club: Bird/56. I tried to capture this picture of the cat looking up at Bird.

Mental note... let's go back to the Bird/56 Jazz bar tomorrow night.