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Hospitality Blitzkrieg

Bathing Furiously For Some Reason

B R

B R

— 4 min read

24 April, 2023 | Osaka, Japan

Highlight today is/was the Kuromon Market, which I mentioned in a previous post and visited multiple times. On this particular day I ran down there for breakfast.

The insides of the croissant pictured above are actually sweet bean paste. I’m not generally a bean fan, but these are excellent (and like $2).

The small bakery is on a side street about half way into the market. But the market is not known for bakeries, it’s known for this all of these delicious treats:

Sweet potatoes are a commonly used ingredient but this is the only place offering snacks of a more starchy variety.
You can of course buy stuff to take home, like you might at Pike Place Market, but here the default is picking something and having them cook it up right there. These prices include the act of cooking and a place to sit and eat (3000 yen is about $20).
Even more than the Golden Gai - where the places have a cover that compels you to buy more from one establishment - the Kuromon market is better built to grab a skewer of something from everyone. Apologies to the vegetarians in the audience - they did have a number of decent plant-oriented skewers.

The market is mostly confined to one long street, but some of my favorite experiences were on the side streets - like the bakery above.

I went into a tiny, barely-marked cafe on a side street for some iced coffee and the elderly woman who was behind the small counter just kept giving me additional things at regular five minute intervals: ice water, green tea, apple slices, a rice biscuit, etc. I’ll admit I had to retreat quickly before my (poor) capability to express my gratitude in the language was exceeded by the hospitality blitzkrieg.

I suspect I could have just walked around the market all day, eating and perusing the other wares, but there was the Osaka National History Museum to explore.

Continuing my trend of visiting all the historical oriented sites in precisely the wrong order, we are now looking at some of the earliest settlement of the Osaka area. A reconstruction of one of those warehouses is just outside the museum.

For much of its history, Osaka was looked down on by other parts of the country as the leading edge of merchants, moneymen, and general capitalist jerks. It’s a slippery slope from “oh sure I guess we need rice brokers to organize all this” to the issuance of paper currency and the first futures market in the world - selling rice that hadn’t yet been harvested - in 1697.

Really identify with the guy in the lower right. That is also how I shower - weirdly mad about the entire experience for no reason.

The museum ranges from prehistory (pre-writing at least) to just seconds before WWII starts, which is fine. It is not at all notable this Japanese history museum focused on Osaka mentions the Sino-Japanese War only offhand as a boost to the local economy. The rest of East Asia does not see it this way! It’s actually very material as far as diplomacy in the region goes.

In other bad news: Osaka has a tower which means, due to precedent, I needed to visit it.

This is the Tsūtenkaku, literally “Tower Reaching Heaven”, in the Shinsekai district - a 15 minute walk south of the Kuromon market. Among the towers I visited, this one is notable as it (1) is the second version - the first was melted down in 1943 to aid the war effort, (2) it has a god, and (3) rather than being in a thriving downtown, it’s ensconced in one of the poorest areas of Japan.

This is Billiken, the God of Happiness or "things as they ought to be", which is distinctly more ominous. Billiken has a deep lore involving an American art teacher, the Mind-Cure craze of the turn of the 20th century, and various other facts that are further proof the universe probably isn’t governed by anything resembling human reason. You rub his feet for good luck. Perfect example right there.

I never ended up being around Shinsekai in the evening, when apparently it warranted advisory warnings from Lonely Planet, but (while certainly depressed) I have genuine trouble taking that kind of thing seriously in the whole of Japan. I’m an American. Dying in a hail of gunfire is the third leading cause of death for children and that only switches to COVID for the broader population. Japan is safe.

Shinsekai did have a videogame I (and a group of miscreants) were utterly obsessed with in community college. I was nearly able to beat it with pure muscle memory.

Now my evening was substantially more fun. I found potentially the best gay bar I visited on my travels. But this is pretty long, so it’ll need to wait for tomorrow.

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