Our Travels In Japan (and other places)

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.

I'll leave you with a short clip I took of...a Hello Kitty Popcorn vending machine in the mall by the aquarium.

Speaking of popcorn, there's a pretty famous chain of cream puff shops called Beard Papa

Yup, that's Beard Papa

but in Osaka, there is also

No beard, just popcorn.

Fortunately for me, I had very few symptoms of the plague. I just had every inch of my body ache and I felt like I had been run over by a truck for about 36 hours. Waking up this morning, I was a bit woozy and felt like my insides were bruised, but otherwise felt 100 times better than I did yesterday. Sumi, on the other hand, was still plagued (heh) by congestion and, as a result, coughing, even though she had been mostly over it for a few days.

With that as our base state, and a day expected to hit 100ºF (38ºC) with near 100% humidity and bright sunlight, we took all the precautions we could. We made sure our legs were covered, brought our opaque umbrella to use as a parasol, obviously had sunscreen, and brought a ton of water. With all that, we accidentally left early. Our tickets were for 9:00AM, and our only scheduled event was 10:30, so we didn't feel we needed to get there all that early. But we ate a very unsatisfying breakfast at the hotel and found ourselves at the expo an hour early.

It was free, but still...

So we get there at 8AM. It's already 88ºF (31ºF) and there is no shade in the corral they have us waiting in. Speaking of waiting, I have said before that waiting in line is a Japanese pastime. The Japanese wait in line more than anyone I know. Arriving an hour before the expo opens, there are a few people already there

Like, a few thousand people.

We started thinking that perhaps it was a good thing we got here early. There were literally over a thousand people already in line. There were people who had 10AM entry tickets that were already lined up. So we got in the corral with everyone else and did everything we could to stay covered.

Some people had the most amazing portable stools I have every seen and I want one.

They telescope out into stools. Packed up, they are a disc the size of a thick frisbee.

Not having a magical stool, we stood huddled under our one umbrella and sweated. Like, a lot. By the time we started moving, we were both drenched from just standing. At 8 in the morning. I don't usually have an issue with heat. This was brutal. We finally got through security and into the expo just after 9.

This is Myaku-Myaku, the mascot of the expo. Mascots are almost universally cute. Some people find a blob with too many eyes cute. Young girls all over the expo were wearing headbands with extra Myaku eyes on them. There are eyes added to things all over the expo. The wheels of the electric scooter things for elderly attendees have eyes on the wheels. The whole thing is slightly unsettling to me, but they seem to like it. Sumi thinks it's kinda cute too. There is no accounting for some tastes.

We stopped at the restrooms first to clean up and put on sunscreen. I watched them carting several people on stretchers to the emergency area. It was only 9:15. There is a huge wooden ring structure that encompasses the entire expo grounds called the Grand Ring. The upper level of the ring gives a great view of the entire grounds. It's really impressive and serves multiple purposes, the chief one today being the only shade available in the expo. We spent a lot of time walking under the ring, but it was also convenient in that there were benches, shops, vending machines, maps, and upcoming event displays throughout the ring.

We spent much of the day ducking into air conditioned pavilions and looking at the displays. There were a lot of interesting things to see and do. Many of the big pavilions had long lines to get in (again, Japan's national pastime), so we...didn't go into them. We never waited more than 10 minutes for any of the exhibits, so we missed some of the more elaborate displays, but with only one day, we didn't want to spend most of it standing the sun waiting to get into a building for 20 minutes. So we explored all five of the "Commons" pavilions that housed numerous small country exhibits and a bunch of smaller pavilions.

The best way I can describe what the expo is like is if you are from southern Wisconsin, and you are familiar with the Milwaukee International Folk Fair, it is like that if the fair had a billion dollar budget, real performers on the stages, and really cool buildings. For those not familiar with the Folk Fair, it is an annual exhibition where people representing countries from all over the world have an exhibit set up to inform and educate people about their country. And food. Lots of international food. And some performances by local cultural groups.

The expo is obviously more than that, but that's the overall feel. The only big pavilion we had access to with a reservation was the Future City exhibition, with an excellent mini diorama of a sustainable eco-friendly future city developed by Osaka Metro University and some corporate partners. It alternated through daytime and nighttime. It had robot cars that drove through the streets (and signaled when turning). The train stopped at its stations. It was really well done.

Here are some shots of the outsides of some of the larger pavilions

Actual speakers that vibrated the mirrored exterior when music played. Looked very cool.

Giant Gundam (or life-sized? Not sure.)

The major water feature they had built had to be shut down due to a serious bacteria infestation in the pipes (Legionella). It is still shut down, which is a shame, but I'll take the no catastrophic lung disease version of the expo.

Cool looking fountain, though

There were some performances occurring throughout the day, as well. We watched a comedy act that wasn't terrible. Most Japanese comedy, from what I've seen, consists of a lot of yelling. Everything is over the top loud and louder. On TV, it will include large subtitles to emphasize what is supposed to be funny, just in case you couldn't hear the yelling. It is unsubtle, it is overacted, it is often slapstick. I have seen very funny Japanese anime and movie clips, so I KNOW they have a good sense of humor, in general and can write and perform good comedy. Why their standup and skit comedy is so painfully bad, I can't understand. This one was short (30 minutes) and was a mix of "comedy" and doing some cool tricks, like solving a Rubik's cube, making increasingly difficult dice towers, etc. It was fun, overall. Then we saw over at the Thai pavilion a Monkey Dance and a short drum and dance performance. Both were quite good. I would have loved to have seen more of the drum and dance portion. I wish we had a better clip to share, but it gives a sense of the kind of drumming they were doing.

As the night wore on, the pavilions started lighting up

That's a giant LED screen taking up the entire roof

Finally at sundown, we settled down to watch the drone show. It was quite well done, timed to music and quite artistic.

People lined the upper level of the ring to watch. We watched from the steps by the water

Exhausted, we made our way back to the hotel, happy that we managed to last the whole day without incident, despite just getting over being sick and the rather extreme weather. I didn't post most of what we saw or did, as it wouldn't translate well to a blog, but here are some of the "better" pictures from the day.