Ever noticed how the most organized people have the least personality, and vice-versa?
We managed to pack three people adequately into a rolling duffle bag and hop a last-minute SkyMark plane from Haneda to Kobe Monday afternoon. Smooth forty-five minute flight with no check in to claim. Hop on a train to Osaka. But lugging a duffle and a family around Japan’s second biggest city is a lot harder than in Tokyo and Yokohama. Escalators are a rarity and when you change trains at any station, you can expect to walk yourself ragged. Consistency is also sorely missed on the Kinki area train lines. From one station to the next, there’s no telling what form, if any, information will take. It could be a center-platform screen with a video-analog clock telling where the next train is going, but not when; looking unlike anything in Kanto. It could just as easily be a faded poster board with hand-corrections, or a station master at the end of a long line of confused travelers. If you’ve lived your life in Osaka, you just know which trains split to which lines, and where to get them. The rest of us don’t live there, so to hell with us. I thought I was pretty adept at Japanese training, but even my wife, a native found it maddening. Navigating the sprawling commuter catacombs was a challenge. Where signs should guide you, turn-by-turn toward the exit or transfer or wherever it is you’re trying to go, about every other junction lacking a sign and there’s very little uniformity to distinguish station information from advertisements.
Oh, and when they say that Japan’s population is aging, they’re thinking about Kansai. At every turn you’re met with walls of elderly Zaks, walking as if blind to everyone else and each other. It would be funny to watch on a surveillance camera, from a comfortable hotel room. And for as many seniors as there are, we noticed a marked absence of foreigners. We realized that we were being “noticed” everywhere, the way it isn’t in Kanto. Stairs and stares!
But after we found our hotel we headed out for a little nightlife in Nihonbashi. Mingling with the masses, I could say for sure there was something different about Osaka folks, but I couldn’t quite say what. A slightly different rhythm. I’ll say, they really know how to do neon. They even have a tower that casts a bizarre shadow way up into the sky.
The okonomiyaki was everything I heard it was. As of this day, my son now considers it amongst the food he will eat.
The main reason we went was for Universal Studios, Japan. Most of the attractions have three stages. Stage one: stand in line for 20 to 200 minutes (depending on when you go). Stage two: one or more large antechambers where an actor or video screen welcomes you and stalls for time. Stage three: everyone pushes into the main theater, trying to get seats together (ha-ha…good luck!) wherein you’ll watch something in 3-D or something like that. But it’s usually worth the wait, if just barely.
No one knows how to milk a good thing like Osaka. Where places like Disneyland would set you up with a fast pass free, based on when you ride, USJ will charge you an extra 5,000 yen for seven of their top ten. I paid it, and I’m glad I did because when we went it was spring break and it would have taken all day to get into maybe four attractions. I’m a chump, I know.
So get the fast passes and try to ration them out over the day. Even with the fast pass, it took as much as twenty minutes to get into some attractions (notice I’m not saying rides? There are few, what you’d call, rides). Each fast pass ticket entitles you to one of three or four attractions. Use the information boards around the park to see which of the choices has the longest wait, and use the pass on that. Then wait out the lesser ones. And around eleven o’clock, a lot of people start eating what USJ creatively calls, “food.” That’s a good time to catch a few shortened lines. For all my barbs, there were some unforgettable points.
Backdraft was my wife’s and my top pick. After a lot of video stalling, all in Japanese, we were treated to a few harrowing minutes of pyrotechnics, and I don’t mean fireworks. They showed us fire doing things that ordinarily would be the last thing you ever saw. There’s no seated part. Make sure you sandwich it between two seated affairs. My son preferred the new Spiderman ride by a narrow margin. I can understand why. It was a spectacular work. It was like Disney Sea’s Indiana Jones ride, with some of the best 3-D I’ve ever seen. The Terminator performance was pretty cool, but the bad overacting is still rasping in my brain.
We changed to a different hotel for the second night, one overlooking a soba shop with an all-night barker, a woman who called out welcomes to the world with a piercing voice that could cut through three feet of soundproofing as easily as our balcony window. And she never got tired. She kept on for hours. I can’t decide if it was more annoying or impressive.
I had developed a bad cold over the last few hours we were all kind of tired, so we packed up and went home the next day.
But we had a great time. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but we did. Man, it’s good to be home.
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