Friday marked the beginning of the trip down memory lane to Kansai. I did my part by walking to Shinagawa station straight after work, meeting up with Joona again and taking the first Shinkansen to Shin-Osaka. 13240 yen, 6 days worth of living expenses budget but meh, I’ll catch up once Joona leaves and I’m all by my lonesome with nobody to drink and eat Kobe Beef with. Nothing too special about the train ride, except it was so different from Finnish ones it almost made me cry. It was both fast and on time. I might never get over this. I’m still seeing a therapist for all the traumatic experiences with VR. Once at our final destination in Shin-Imamiya, Osaka, we went for some shitty ramen due to all decent food places being closed at the time, before going to the hostel to sleep. Turns out the clerk at the entrance had been a guide to Tunna and Riku during the Japan episodes of Madventures.
Saturday was a day worth remembering, accounting to three factors.
The main plan for Saturday was to go to Kobe to eat the best beef in the world in the best restaurant in the world. Hype enough? We departed from the hostel around 11 to be in Kobe at lunch time. Wakkoqu’s lunch was once again something to be feared. The young master who was responsible for the show was the same as two years ago and the food was equally excellent. I’ll add pictures if I ever get them from the master of cameras. The pinnacle of the whole experience was that they actually offered cream with coffee. Real cream, not any of that low fat milk or any other shit “health-conscious” people like to drink. Take that you non-believers. I guess I could ramble about Wakkoqu and Kobe beef institutions for long enough to fill the internet but it’s really something to experience yourself. Oh, and it did make my wallet exactly 7304 yen lighter. That’s over 3 days of food budget again. But if I starve later at least I’ll starve happy.
Part two of the Saturday Experience Extraordinnaire was to go to the electronics store Labi in Sannomiya so Joona could drool over some Apple products for a few hours. Actually the goal was very clear but if I don’t take advantage of this opportunity to mock the Apple fanboy, the repressed mock will turn into bile and I might die. Ideally, Joona was supposed to buy a MacBook air and 3 Apple TVs while taking advantage of Labi’s member card point collection system to pay for part of the set. The plan was both retardedly ambitious and complicated, and eventually took about 2 hours to complete. It might come as a surprise, but we didn’t have member cards. Initially, Joona spent half an hour speaking with the only store clerk in the 8 story electronics supermarket with an adequate grasp of English to know if the plan was actually achievable while I wasted my life playing Angry Birds on a demonstration iPad, getting displeased looks from other customers.
Once the details were clear, something we in Finland call “säätäminen”, began. In order to get membership to collect points, the clerk said, one needs a Japanese phone number. Well it sure as hell wasn’t Joona who had one. With the help of the same enthusiastic clerk guiding me through the Japanese online registration process I was finally able to register a Labi membership, thus allowing Joona to buy the Air, collect points and use said points to buy Apple TVs for the glory of all. When everything seemed clear, the cashier had to call her superior in order to make sure that Sampo Pankki was an organization to be trusted. Unberlievably (sic) there were no last minute transaction problems and after almost suffering a heat stroke from spending the afternoon at the Labi Electronics Sauna, we finally got out with one happy Apple freak and one disgruntled Labi gold member. I’ll get back to the heat issues in Japanese buildings in an exclusive Anttirant later on. On that note, the Kobe adventure was over, but the evening was just beginning.
I had made plans for us to go drinking with a few old friends from Kansai Gaidai at 9, Ryan-sensei and Sayumi-chan. Since there aren’t_really_enough_options in Japan when it comes to drinking, off to Toriki we went. Tanreis were flowing, the edamame was taunting Henrik from across the continent, chicken heart was delicious, nankotsu still sucked but the get-together was excellent all in all. You don’t deserve to know the details. After some yopparai philosophizing on the last train we made it back to the hotel and Joona packed his bags to get ready to leave early the next morning. Well, packed his bags, except he left me with a well designed cardboard box labeled MacBook Air but had the nerve to take the actual content back to Finland with him.
Edamame yanka!
On that day, 2 years ago
With Joona leaving early on Sunday morning I was free to enjoy the rest of the day roaming around Osaka and going through places from days gone by. There were some places that I should have written about last time I was in Japan but I was busy that spring doing something else. Also, I had an interesting epiphany while wandering around. Interesting for me, not so much for readers. The thought that struck me was that Shin-Imamiya has to the best place in Osaka, period. First of all, it has a bad reputation, so by Japanese standards that means that there are a few homeless and / or drunk people around making life more interesting. Not unrelated to that reputation, it’s the cheapest place to find a quality business hotel for a stay in Osaka. We paid 3000 yen a night for a twin room. Not too shabby.
The next unique spot in the area is Spa World, located conveniently around 50 meters from the correct entrance of the Shin-Imamiya JR station. Spa World is essentially a hotel / spa / relaxation complex with an innumerable amount of spas, baths, saunas, pools, restaurants and whatnot. It became a fan favourite in Spring 2009 because of a campaign price that allows people to enter the place for the whole day for only 1000 yen. The spa cannot be doing very well as the campaign is still ongoing and there is no way for them to pay for all the water and electricity with that price when taking into account the amount of people that go there. Spa World is also the international benchmark for everything Engrish, as appointed by the Japan Ministry of Engrish, Jearousy and Googre Transrate (MEJGT). While I could not find such old classics as: “Woman only bath, men cannot enter from here” or “Woman only room. Stay out, man” there had still been no effort to make grammatical sense:
• “Wears inside the building”
• “It’s excite!”
• “I hope smoking in the smoking room.”
• “Let’s tanning!”
• “Doragon foot”
• “Please note so slippery”
• “Antitheft and locker key wristband are always with you please yourself”
Engrish Winner of the Week
Outside of Spa World is one of the saddest reminders of the delusions of grandeur prior to the Lost Decade and at the same time one of the coolest potential attractions anywhere, ever: A roller coaster running through a shopping mall. Both of the aforementioned have been abandoned for a long time, however, and now it appeared that the entire building complex was getting demolished. I was still able to get a glance at a place that, in the right circumstances, could have made Chuck Norris fall to his knees in awe.
In addition to Shin-Imamiya being cheap and having Spa World, it’s also the center of the world for… well… retro gaming nerds. The huge shopping center for normal people, Namba, is also just a short walk away but I tend to always be drawn towards the small game and electronics shops of Den-Den-Town, located between Nipponbashi and Ebisucho stations on the Sakaisuji line. Even now I wasn’t really able to buy game consoles and take them back to Tokyo but I was still able to gather energy just by enjoying the atmosphere and 8-bit game music at スーパーポテト and ゲーム 探偵団. If you can’t read Japanese characters that’s your loss. I had to ask the store manager for the reading of the latter kanji. I also promised myself an N64 once I manage to turn in the final version of my thesis.
I eventually bought some cheap manga for the trip back and spent the Shinkansen ride back to Tokyo wondering how I could best manage my living expenses to avoid running out of money before March.
-Antti