Robot Claw

Once again the day began early with me heading down for food at the crack of dawn. I’m guessing there had been reports of a suspicious gadabout in the building since the number of security robots had doubled, but I was able to evade them safely make it to McDonald’s for Christmas breakfast.

Our goal today was the Osu shopping district, and maybe a (self purchased) Christmas gift or two. We hadn’t done much research so were eager to see why the district is on every list of things to see in Nagoya.

The subway was busy as any other workday. Despite being less than a quarter the population of Tokyo Nagoya is still a very big and busy city and in rush hour you’re one of a zillion people. If you didn’t like crowds you may be a little put off but this is one thing I love about Japan.

That’s Osu Kannon Buddhist temple, after which the adjacent shopping street is named. The temple is about 700 years old and has a rich history. The current version is relatively new (about 50 years) since the place had been razed in WW2.

We’ve got a tinge of travel flu (which may simply be due to the very dry air) so we were careful to breath in the healing incense at the temple. Given we feel better this afternoon I’m guessing it worked 🙂

‘Osu shopping street’ is actually a series of interconnected pedestrian covered shopping streets that span several blocks adjacent to the temple. Apparently they cover a few miles and have over 1200 shops. Of particular note to us was that a large portion of these shops (farthest from the temple) are game/anime/card shops, which makes this Nagoya’s version of Akihabara.

That’s the real entrance to an Alice In Wonderland themed store, and yes you must bend down to get through the door! The shop itself sells all sorts of slightly gothic Alice themed merchandise, and was quite popular.

I sent some postcards from the above postbox – you’ll probably get one – and I wonder if they’ll have a Christmas Day postmark? Be sure to check!

Osu seems to have several local idol groups (men and women) and there’s lots of posters and such along the shopping streets to promote them. Can you see me hidden in the above shot?

There’s lots of Game Centers as well, and with my unparalleled skill I effortlessly won Kristin this lovely hair clip (which she removed right after this photo).

I found a retro arcade as well. Can you guess which game I’m playing?

Naturally we visited many game/otaku shops, but I’ll probably do a dedicated post about that sort of stuff in time. One slight difference from Akiba was the fact most of the Osu maid cafes were concentrated in a very small area (most of them right next to each other) and there was quite a variety!

The above was a used book/cd/dvd shop ran by an ancient man. Most of the right wall are 7″ singles and there must have been thousands of them. I bet there were treasures to be unearthed in there…

This photo captures the spirit of today. Lots of laughs, partly due to tiredness and partly due to the mad, quintessentially Japanese stuff we saw today. It was a fun way to spend Christmas Day!

Speaking of Christmas, it seems here the holiday is mostly decorations and music. And they don’t skimp on the lights, with most large shopping centers having massive displays!

Advertising screens often show Christmas videos, and employees often wear Christmas decorations on their clothes. Considering Japan doesn’t celebrate Christmas, the decorations here are more abundant and impressive than anything I’ve seen in the USA.

The above was taken yesterday at the zoo for instance, and was a tiny (one inch) Santa in a fish tank!

This evening crowds assembled to pose for photos with the tree at the base of our hotel building. This seemed to be continuing all day so it seems important to many that you get a snap in front of a big Christmas tree!

Chicken still seems to be the flavoured Christmas meal. We saw long lines today at chicken restaurants and when I went to KFC the other day they had a dedicated machine set up for Christmas preorders.

Christmas cakes are also very popular, and sold almost everywhere. The above photo was taken in a department store (the cakes are about $40 each) but you can buy cheaper ones – almost always strawberry – at convenience stores.

Kristin today purchased herself two very special Christmas cakes! These are ‘piyorin’, a chicken shaped ‘pudding cake’ that is a hot commodity here in Nagoya. As you can see, today they were Christmas themed 🙂

Our hotel is the one in the middle, and we’re on the fourth highest floor on this side (in fact I can see our room in this photo). Today was a long, eventful and very fun day; a very happy Christmas!

I hope yours was wonderful too 🙂

I woke at 2 am because of ‘second stage jet-lag’ and in the very early hours ventured out looking for food. Since our room is on the 21st floor of a tower block and it takes two elevators to get to ground level this entailed walking through a dark and empty lobby 15 floors above ground level while being watched by a security robot. Eventually I got to the ground but the station shops were (unsurprisingly) all closed and I had to venture out to find a 24 hour convenience store. Breakfast was saved!

There’s the room view an hour or so after sunrise. Even though we’re not in the tallest building in Nagoya I like our view doesn’t show the higher ones so we feel at the top of the world 🙂

About seven hours after waking, we headed to Higashiyama Zoo, which is a popular tourist site here in Nagoya. It’s a somewhat sprawling combination of zoo, botanical gardens and children’s amusement park, that has been open for over 85 years. It’s showing its age in certain parts, but overall was a fun place to visit and the best zoo I’ve been to in Japan.

The highlight for us was a feisty jaguar who was playing in his pool. I’d never seen a large cat swimming before and he was a particular handsome example who was swim-playing just like a household cat.

The zoo also had an impressive nocturnal house and a gigantic freshwater aquarium building called ‘medaka world’ that felt like a live fish collectors dream as long as you were focused on the medaka species. I’m not exaggerating: hundreds of small meticulously kept tanks with an eye-opening variety of unremarkable small freshwater fish on display!

The zoo had all the usual animals – including a world-class koala exhibit – but also some I’d not seen before, such as siamangs, bush dogs and volcano rabbits (no I’m not making these up, go and google them)! Of particular note to the Antipodeans reading this was they also had a ‘woylie’ on display, which is an Australian beast with a name I’d not seen before. It looked a lot like a bettong…

They also had three life sized (?) dinosaurs on display, which are currently being restored so they can remain on display for years to come. There was a lot of construction in various parts (including a new Komodo dragon enclosure) so the zoo seems well-funded for a place that only cost ¥600 to enter.

Lunch was pasta and potato. It was very cool in the morning, so we used the indoor areas (the reptile house, ‘medaka world’ etc) to ‘soak up some heat’. The food was ordered from a quaint machine using a ticket system and was both inexpensive and much better than we expected from a zoo.

It took us about 4 hours to see the animals and then we visited the kiddie amusement park to ride the rollercoaster. Unfortunately we didn’t fit into the carriages since there wasn’t enough legroom! So I rode the Ferris wheel (did you glimpse it in the dinosaur photo above?) and we went through a mirror maze.

We then rode ‘Slope Shooter’, a very unique gravity based ‘coaster’ that has been entertaining people at the park for 63 years. There’s no track, and you ride in a wheeled carriage as it travels down a steel track somewhat like a bobsled. It was slow but fun and historic and actually the reason we learned of this place since someone we follow on YouTube made a video about it several months ago.

Before we left we rode the antique monorail all around the zoo for a last look. It was like sitting in a little greenhouse and was very comfy.

Nagoya station was bonkers busy when we got back mid afternoon, and it was notably busier than the previous day. I went out a bit later (around 6) to get some dinner and the crowds had even increased to the point where walking through the food levels of the department store at the station was a challenge! Was this due to Christmas? Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow…

We took the bullet train west today. The trip was comfy as always and the clear skies provided wonderful views, including of Fuji.

As always we are ekiben on the train, and as always mine was the same as ever: a plain pork cutlet sandwich. It was delicious!

Our destination was the city of Nagoya. While less than a quarter the size of Tokyo, Nagoya is larger than any Australian city and almost every USA city. On trains we’d sped through it many times on the way to and from Kyoto or Osaka: it was time to stop and visit Nagoya itself!

Since we arrived after lunch todays plan was just to get the lay of the land (so to speak) so after dropping our stuff at the hotel we headed east two stops on a subway to visit Mirai Tower:

There’s a strip of parkland running vertically through the city, and this old TV tower has been standing there for 70 years. Apparently it was the first of its kind in Japan (Godzilla even destroyed it in his first ever film!) and even though it’s nostalgically short by todays standards (about 2/3rd the height of Sydney Tower) we had to go up for a look.

That’s the view looking west, with the skyscrapers in the distance being close to Nagoya Station (I’m on the 21st floor of one as I write this). The tower is old and the views aren’t great if you’ve been up taller towers, but it still has a quaint appeal.

One concession to modernity is that the tower sells padlocks for couples to clip onto the gates of the outdoor viewing platform. There were a great many attached – most seemingly very new – and I wonder how often they are removed? While you can attach them anywhere you like on the outside section, the biggest density was at an area which had been blessed by ‘The Bridal Mother’. Don’t ask me what that means 🙂

From atop the tower we saw this Ferris Wheel attached to a building, and since it was a short walk it became our next destination (although we of course had to detour into an impressive three-floor crane game center). The wheel is called the ‘Sky Boat’ and right now they’re having a collaboration with a K-pop band named NiziU.

I bought my ticket (only ¥600!) and when I got to the wheel I was asked which girl I wanted to ride with. Having never heard of the band I just took the next carriage which meant I experienced Sky Boat with Miihii!

This amounts to nothing really, although the carriage has a touchscreen in it on which you can watch a surprisingly large amount of NiziU music videos or recorded messages from the fans. The ride was smooth and slow and the views were fairly good for a wheel in the middle of a city, and I sat like a handsome gadabout in the company of the dulcet tunes of NiziU. (By the way, KLS hates Ferris Wheels so patiently waited below!)

That’s the view from the highest point of the wheel. You can see the Mirai Tower peeping above one of the buildings in the middle right.

For a country that doesn’t really celebrate Christmas, Japan loves Christmas displays. This monster tree is at the entrance of our hotel (which itself occupies 15 high floors of a skyscraper), and shops are full of all sorts of limited Christmas items as well, like this fetching black cat Santa outfit:

Or this pistachio tree-shaped mini cake KLS bought for dessert:

I’ll probably write more about Japanese Christmas in a few days…

I’ll end today with our hotel room view. At the bottom you can see the tracks of Nagoya Station, and every few minutes a bullet train speeds through. We’re over 20 stories up, and should have a beautiful sunset view if we’re in the room at the right time. The room is very comfortable and we’ll have fun in Nagoya these next few days 🙂

As seems to have become tradition, we went to Ikebukuro today for shopping, Game Center’s and arcades. This is the sixth Japan trip in which day one has been spent at Ikebukuro, and as always it ended up being the right choice.

We are of course jetlagged and our food schedules are all messed up but we feel better than yesterday and I assume we’ll be mostly fine tomorrow.

That’s one of the limited Christmas drinks at Maccas (‘Double Choco Strawberry Frappe’). We ate in the Maccas in Sunshine City and even though Christmas here is hardly as big as in the west the entire mall was bonkers and it felt as if most of Tokyo had turned out to shop today! This was true for most of the shops we visited, and the lines at restaurants eventually became unreasonable, such as a three-hour wait at our local Kura Sushi.

Oh unlike last Christmas and when I was here in June, foreign tourists are conspicuous in their absence. Either my theory was correct (ask me!) or maybe they just don’t want to visit in winter?

We bought lots of stuff – stationary, cosmetics, candy, books etc – and as a result were laden with full bags all day. I still found time for some retro arcade gaming at Mikado, and I’ll say again if I lived in Tokyo I’d be visiting that place all the time.

Given we’d woken very early and set out hours before the shops even opened, it ended up being a very long day and by the time we dragged ourselves back to the hotel we were exhausted.

In fact even as I write I’m struggling to remain awake. But sleep is for the dead, since I’ve yet to sort and pack everything again so we can ship the suitcases to our final hotel as we travel away from Tokyo for the next week. Where will we go? Stay tuned…

We’re in Japan. The trip was very long (~25 hours) and tiring and we’re both a bit ruined.

Almost eight hours of the trip was a layover in Detroit airport, and were it not for frozen coke mayhaps we wouldn’t have made it!

Don’t we look happy when we boarded the international flight? Fourteen hours later when we landed, all we felt was relief!

It was very late and we just went to a few shops near our hotel (which we’ve stayed at twice before). It’s in the Asakusa district which is full of restaurants, bars and entertainment venues and the above is a selection of a series of new signs on the street celebrating the vibe of this lively part of the city.

We’ve got an exciting vacation ahead of us. Stay tuned for details…