I finally made the trek into Osaka on the week, which I’ve been meaning to do pretty much since I’ve got here. It’s suprisingly close from where I live, with the right connections you can get there in under an hour. Coming from a city like Perth, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer bigness of cities. Toyko is an exception to the rule because it’s just so fucking big as to be incomprehendable. It stops being a city and becomes some sort of urban landscape, if that makes any sense at all. When there’s more people in a city block that most Australian cities, and these blocks just shoot outwards with no apparent horizon or breaks between residential and commercial districts it becomes incomprehendible to me.

Osaka is big, but it’s a very real big city. You feel like you’re in a big city, rather than some fantasy wonderland on another planet, something which was always in the back of my mind while I was in Tokyo. That said though, there’s still some stuff in Osaka that made me do a double-take and go, hey, that’s a little bizarre. For example, a four storey cd shop with people browsing and shopping as usual, fully staffed and with what looked like a pretty regular turnover of visitors. This was at 3:30 in the morning. Or the stores that hired people to stand inside their entrances to tell them that the shop was shut, rather than simply locking the doors. These guys seemed to stand around for about an hour before they bothered actually closing the doors and then another hour before turning off the lights and closing shop.

Osaka is definately not a place you can explore in a weekend, but I think I’ll be making more than a few trips there over the year. I’ve heard it’s home to some of the best clubs in the world, although the ones we checked out on Saturday night weren’t the most spectacular, I think it’s a process of elimination. We found this awesome place called the Mar’s Bar with some extremely enthusiastic chick behind the turntables spinning some really random shit. I got her to play Cibo Matto’s – Know Your Chicken though, and that just made my night. Hooray for Japan.

Posted in Japan on Tuesday September 2, 2003.

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