Our Travels In Japan (and other places): Osaka Aquarium and Drum Tao!

After a 14 hour day in the heat, we slept in a bit and missed the "breakfast" the hotel offered. Without an Andersen Bakery as an option, we went to Plan B: Vie de France. It's a chain of bakery/coffee shops in Japan and it's pretty good, though not on the level of Andersen. They did have some interesting pastries, however

Shima-enaga buns

Shima-enaga are one of the cutest birds you can imagine. They are from Hokkaido and they look like flying marshmallows.

They are the new rage in cute animals, along with capybaras in Japan. We didn't have one of those, but had a more normal breakfast

Vegetable Foccacia was so good I started eating before the mandatory picture

It had been a number of years since we visited the Osaka Aquarium, once the largest in the world, now just...well...really big. So we headed down to Osakako (Osaka Port) for a visit

It was not as hot as yesterday, but still very bright and warm. We got our tickets, had to wait 30 minutes before we could get in because they space out how many people they allow in at once. It's pretty important, because it's already ridiculously loud and crowded with tourists and small children (I'm not sure which is worse, and that's saying something) so keeping the number of visitors at any one time to a maximum is a good idea. There is a small shopping mall right across the aquarium plaza, so we stayed in there "shopping" to stay cool until our 15 minute entry window arrived (Yep, Osaka gives you 15 minutes to get in once you buy the ticket.).

The biggest attraction in the aquarium is the central tank, which spans the entire height of the building and houses all sorts of rather large sea creatures:

Like whale sharks and manta rays...

There were at least six or seven different species of shark, including the whale shark, hammerhead shark, black tipped reef shark, nurse sharks, and several others. There are also numerous rays, including the manta ray, spotted eagle ray, and others. The main tank was very impressive, as were many of the smaller exhibits. It's a very good aquarium and worth a visit if you ever find yourself in Osaka with an afternoon to kill.

After the aquarium, Sumi headed back to the hotel and I made a brief visit to Namba, one of the main entertainment centers in Osaka, and home to a Yellow Submarine location. Yellow Submarine is a chain of game and hobby stores in Japan and one of the only retail outlets for board games. I wasn't planning on getting anything in particular, unless something I couldn't pass up appeared, but I was curious about the shop. Other than about six separate maids trying to get me into their cafes in the short walk from the station, it was an easy trip. Namba has two locations, one is just TCG (Trading Card Games, like Magic or Pokémon) the other is board games, including used games. Very nice place, though I still cannot understand the organization (if there is any) of the games on display. They are not alphabetized by title or designer, they are not grouped by publisher or genre or even box size. It feels like they just dumped whatever came it on a shelf, cleaned it up a bit, and there you go. This is true for all Yellow Submarine stores.

Anyway, I returned without purchasing anything, took a shower and we headed to ABC Hall to watch Drum Tao

They are very good at dramatic

Drum Tao is one of the three big kumidaiko groups that tour the US, the other two being Yamato and, of course, Kodo. Without getting all Taiko-snobby, it's hard to describe Drum Tao's shows. They are good drummers and very good dancers and performers, sometimes sacrificing musicality for flash and visuals, but still playing very well. Their stage shows is great, very impactful, sometimes veering into what I would call "hair metal" levels of circus, but usually not too over the top.

A few examples I can give would be during one song, they climb on top of their oodaiko and straddle it like a horse while playing it. Another would be during their encore, one of the women in the troupe's sole job was to wear a huge and complicated costume and stand on a pedestal in the middle of the stage. No dancing, no playing, just stand there. This is also the group were the women usually are wearing some form of high heels throughout the show. Tonight's show they were toned down, and had sandals with a modest heel (but still not flat). In the US a few years ago, they were wearing boots with heels that were several inches tall and I was genuinely a little nervous watching them dance in them, but they are professionals.

The show was very enjoyable, the way a Big Mac is very enjoyable. You know it's not great. You know there are better options out there. But sometimes you just want that. And they put on a great, energetic show that never stops for the 75 minutes they perform. I'm glad we got to see them and see them in the ABC Hall, which is a rather small theater, so even our seats that we purchased a week before the show were great. No photography was allowed, so sadly we can't share any of the show with you. But here is a clip from The Stephen Colbert Show from a number of years ago.