Japan for the 10th time (Finally!) - October and November 2023 - Page 6

This is a live music venue, but there is no show on tonight. I guess they are lining up to buy a ticket, probably for a concert in a completely different city, because some archaic tradition stipulates that in order to see BIG BOY PANTS MAN in Wakayama you must buy a ticket in person from a venue in Osaka at 9:40 on a Sunday morning 17 days before the show.

My journey south, was largely like this. There were homeless shelters and gatherings of people with various horrible disabilities.

Graffiti too, this guy is the devil.

Strangely, the vending machines were less likely to be drinks, and more likely to be frozen food.

Each station I went past, 4 I think, had its own covered shopping street, the first 3 were almost completely abandoned.

The last one very near the shrine had a bit more going on, mostly fish related.

Over the road from the shrine is a garden of sorts. Not Japan's best effort.

Although the trees were nice enough.

Time for some shrine, allow me to google - One of Japan's most renowned shrines, Sumiyoshi Taisha is the head of approximately 2300 Sumiyoshi shrines throughout Japan. Out the front people are selling chocolate coated marshmallows and fake antiques.

They did not trust their arch bridge architect, so it is reinforced with a lot of concrete.

There were a lot of people playing dress ups inside. Every building had a gold thing in front of it for instagram opportunities.

Exactly like this. I asked to sit with them but they pretended to not understand English.

Instead I crashed a wedding.

They fled as fast as they could.

Believe it or not, these flags all around the shrine are advertising a local tyre store, buy 3 tyres get the 4th free.

And for my final pic, some kind of plastic coated everything 'shop', which I think is selling political opinions. That is all for my rest day, tonight I will go somewhere colourful to balance out the grey day.

First some illuminations from the 12 level Namba parks. You can walk all the way to the top up a series of stairs through a lot of roof gardens. In fact this may be the greatest roof garden.... in the world.

LED lights are one of the 9 wonders of the modern world, without which none of this shrine for enticing people to the mall to purchase more stuff would be possible.

Last illumination, featuring a waterfall of LED's.

Here are the back streets of Denden town. It is like Akihabara used to be, a lot more maid cafe's and porn.

There are some cool shops down each side, headphone shops, cables etc. There are also many shops selling vintage game cartridges for people that pretend to like playing video games made in 1984 to impress people on Omegle (RIP).

I think this might be the most popular place, based on signage up and down the street, the rather unfortunately named kids land.

Shinsekai, last time I was here I think I had okonomiyaki in a place full of people smoking. You cannot smoke anymore in restaurants in Japan.

Some of the places here are shut, but authentically old looking.

The restaurants here are known for their subtlety.

The shot. My effort was not great.

One more photo of the amusement area of Shinsekai, there are shooting galleries and similar things between the restaurants. One restaurant has an actual full size fishing boat in it floating in a pool with fish in the pool.

You can do some target shooting with a real long bow. What could go wrong?

Now for the weird karaoke alleys, lots of them! The sound was truly horrific. My heart will go on, coming from 9 places simultaneously, in broken English.

Last stop of the tour, megamall, here is the food court. Some good options but too many screaming kids even for me.

I ascended up a level. Tennoji is a modern place, lots of train lines, I think there is a zoo nearby.

The rooftop restaurant area had a few places without lines, many places inside the mall had long lines.

And so I ended up at a steak restaurant, and got the steak and chicken combo. The thing under the tricolore is a chicken thigh fillet. The steak was of a good quality, more vegetables would have been appreciated. Also this was served flaming, along with a suitable exclamation from the guy that set it on fire to frighten the hell out of me.
Tomorrow I am going most of the way to Tottori, I know how I am getting there, but am yet to figure out how best to get back because I do not know how long I shall be!

This is my direct to Takeda from Osaka station Hamakaze limited express super rapid special #1. I am reliably informed Hamakaze means divine wind from the beach, which is reference to the fact that most kamakaze pilots come from the famous sand hill area of Tottori.

The inside of this train was plain, but wait for the return train to see something unusual.

Here is the station at Takeda. Fairly plain, fairly damp.

Castle ruins information centre, it said something about making movies and a recording studio, I have no idea why. The small town has embraced the castle ruins, well some people have, and turned their old houses into little cafes (closed when I got there). But there is some drama, it seems photos of the ruins were used in an ad for a google pixel phone and after that too many people came and some towns people wanted to make it harder to visit.

I had to cross the track (single train track along this train line) to start my ascent.

The streets on this side of the tracks were very nice, lots of historic buildings, more on that later.

This shrine starts the path up the left side of the castle, I did it the wrong way which required some doubling back at the top to the ticket area, you should go up the right side and down the left side.

The path up the left side was damp, but fine. Going up never seems slippery.

A view opened up half way up, but this view becomes completely redundant soon.

The ticket office. There are toilets down there on the right. I am sure I read and saw signs saying there are no toilets.

Time to go explore the ruins. It stopped raining completely.

Now we start the views from the top. Still a bit foggy for the first few shots.

Camera struggling with yellow grass again.

Make that bit of blue sky come over here.

Probably shot of the day due to the sun making an appearance.

The town of Takeda and a bit of wall.

Very nice bits of wall. The guy that sold me my ticket ($5 cash only) probably spoke no English he understood, but he did say something like 'no castle at top, only castle ruins, no refund because you no see castle!'. So obviously people have come here expecting to see a castle and were disappointed to see piles of rocks.

This was a surprise. I am standing on the top, following the route signs. You can see a group of people below, who are yelling at me in Japanese, they were really mad. So when I moved they all clapped because now they could take a photo. Rude.

Here I am where people were hurling abuse at me. Note you can see 2 people on the top. I did not feel as though I needed to yell at them. If you want a photo with no people in it, wait for there to be no people.

Time for a bit more view. Kind of looks like water is on my lense, but it is cloud and fog.

Excessive sharing of piles of rocks in photographic form.

The descent down was rather slippery.

It got slipperier, and it started raining a bit again, but I stayed upright.

Takeda low shot.

Here is a shrine and a graveyard at the bottom.

Actually a whole street full of shrines, most had info signs explaining who was buried there and how they were related to whoever built the castle. It was at this point I decided if I ran as hard as I could, I could just make a 6km round trip to the view point up the other side of the valley. GO!

I stopped up the steep road when I noticed a rainbow.

View from the top. Apparently this is a great spot for cherry blossoms and there seemed to be camping areas. I had to pay $2 to get into this viewing area even though I only had a couple of minutes before I had to run down again. The old lady that sold me my ticket was very confused when I came running back out the gate 2 minutes after she sold the ticket to a bright red sweaty maniac. Anyway, that is the castle across the valley there.

Let me zoom in as far as I can. Now you can see the ruins.

I made it back down with time to spare. Light was good for this shot crossing the river along the valley.

And here comes my one carriage train, all painted up in ridiculous colours. Obviously now that I am boarding a train back to Osaka, full sunshine!

And what a train it was. Let me explain its features. First of all there is a display of handbags for sale in a glass cabinet. Seriously! But also, sideways seats for the view. I was not able to get a sideways seat for myself unfortunately.
So that was a long day of train journeying to see a busted old castle in the rain before running like a maniac up a hill.

A rare sign indeed in Japan, lot's of places are still militant about NO PHOTO.

Because of the sign, I obliged. This is in the Edion. So many out of stock cameras still. Fujifilm has banned people in Japan from even ordering their cameras due to the backlog.

I headed underground and thought I was going north but was really going east. That was really confusing actually.

So I had to double back to Dotonbori. Not so busy at this point, but when I returned to my hotel later on it was so busy I detoured around the main part.

Down at the water level there was almost no one. Kind of strange that people avoid going 10 steps down to check out the view at sewer level.

This is actually a ferris wheel of sorts, going around the Donki. I assume I have noticed it before but I could not recall, I will check my previous visits to see if I am losing my mind.

This area of the canal is very busy early on, all those people are lined up for the octopus testicle shop.

Osaka takes the Chinese favourite brand for money laundering very seriously.

This is now the start of America-mura. A lot of sports stores and gyms in this building which is bigger than it looks here.

America-mura is the place to go to buy blue jeans, hats with logos you do not recognise and other marijuana related clothing, all while listening to music with no actual music in the music. I stayed in a hotel on the next corner from here once, I remember it was pretty good.

After the Coco failure, I headed downstairs to go find a train station ramen option but instead found a food court. And it has protectice plastic sheeting between every chair and was not very busy at all, I was sold! And yes, I did get my meal from the pictured bibini, which is Japanese for bibim (presumably).

And here it is, all the best meals come on brown trays.
Tomorrow I go to Kyoto where I shall also stay for 4 nights. Will it be as busy as Osaka? Probably.

The morning light in Osaka was great, so one more photo of Dotonbori.

Hours later, and it was time to take a great loop of the gravel path around the imperial palace. So much gravel.

A rather underwhelming pond. I have never been inside the palace walls, you can apply to go in, but you cannot just turn up and go in. I think there is a passport requirement, guided tour only arrangement, which I am sure would result in me being rejected and deported.

A gate.

And a lot more gravel, and a lot of wall.

The grounds are large but not very garden-y, this is probably the nicest bit due to the light.

But now, what you have all been waiting for, my hotel room! Sotetsu Fresa again, as will be the next one in Tokyo. This one is a bit bigger, you can walk down both sides of the bed! A rarity in Japan. Also a strange card table setup, I am sitting there now as I type this. Finding electricity was a challenge.

And of course, the toilet! Look at it. A porcelain marvel. actually it is probably plastic. Probably the largest bathroom of this trip so far. The check in was people not a machine, I have booked a double room but I am only one person, they did not really understand this. I got the whole NO PARTY IN ROOM speech that I sometimes get. So now I am planning a sad party for one, with a diet 7-eleven lemon drink and a cut up orange sealed in plastic.

Across the road from my hotel, the start of the shopping street. Not a lot of people.

It does not seem to matter which country I go to, there is some idiot driving around with loud speakers going on about something. Probably the Korean unification church that is now understood to run all of Japan.

Here is a view back down the main street from the temple / shrine steps.

My 4th time taking this photo.

Inside the complex, there is a night market. Night markets are a bit of a rare thing in Japan compared to the rest of Asia.

I had my camera set with a higher aperture than I should have for hand held low light pics, but this one came out ok.

I remembered this place is always popular with foreigners.

The local kabuki theatre.

Another edion, the store that encourages taking photos.

I rewareded them again by ascending to their food levels and treating myself to omurice AND a side salad. So extravagant.

I walked past but not up and down the covered shopping streets, I will save that for another night. For example, it might be raining on Friday night.

Although from the entrance I did spot this place. And there is no other way to end the photos for tonight than with the micro pig house.