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B R

B R

— 4 min read

21 April, 2023 | Osaka, Japan

So it was finally time to move on from Tokyo. I took the bullet train, or Shinkansen, to Osaka.

The actual Mount Fuji, accept no several substitutes.

You don’t need to get a ticket before you show up because they run so frequently -  every 10 minutes! It takes about 2.5 hours to move 320 miles. For comparison, Seattle to Portland is 150 miles - 3.5 hours by train and a shade under three (3) hours by car, depending on your traffic timing of course.

This does not wait for traffic and will consistently exceed speeds of 200mph.

This line was started in 1959 and completed in 1964 - two years after the Space Needle was finished. It was immediately successful and hit the 100 million passenger mark in just three years. It now averages 22,000 passengers per hour. At this rate, you could take the full population of Seattle and Portland and completely transpose them - everyone in one city is now in the other - in the time it takes to binge watch Parks and Recreation or Breaking Bad (~63 hours)1.

For the first time since Mexico City, I’m staying in an entirely legitimate hotel. But it’s not a Western style hotel as you might be familiar. It’s actually smaller than the half-dozen stacked phonebooths that made up where I stayed in Tokyo, but it is considerably more comfortable in every way:

Notable additions compared to the Tokyo place: a desk, a chair, hooks for everything, and an enormous big screen TV that occasionally played an anime about the APA hotel chain. I think they also have their own j-pop boy band?
The bath is slim but deep and I think that’s great. I want one. You could still fit two people in here if you were feeling intimate about it. Note the one facet which you just swivel between the bath and the sink. This is one of the like 87345 efficiencies packed into the place.
And I can’t leave this topic without a translation of the toilet controls. I tried literally three different translation apps and “Admin’s mouth” is consistent between them.

But I wasn’t just going to sit around the rest of the evening. If anything - I was hungry. So I went out in precisely the wrong direction, north. As I would rapidly learn, just south of my hotel is a host of restaurants, tiny shops, and fun oddities. But the north is basically a barren wasteland of fashion.

I’m including the only two good things I found in my immediate outing to the north. I do another round later on for a very specific psuedo-dog-related purpose.

I finally give up and picked a place to eat almost randomly. They only served octopus balls. I feel pretty bad for having eaten these - both because octopuses seem pretty neat and intelligent and also because they are a great way of searing off the entire surface area of your mouth if you don’t let them cool. Anyway please accept my sincere apologies this was not meant as a provocation.

While sitting there, I attempted to look up a night life activity for the evening. It was Friday night after all.

I can’t find this bar now, but the entire website was a poem that was just this. I couldn’t find it in real life either. I want it to be real.

I ventured way further north to Kita on the belief there were at least a couple of good LGBTQ bars up there. Physique proved actually impossible to find, but GRAND SLAM was sizable and welcoming, filled at least 50% with foreigners.

In the taxonomy of queer-oriented bars, this one was pretty obviously targeted exclusively at gay men - similar to the last bar I visited in my “LGBTQ Night Out” in Santiago. Telltale signs included (1) being immediately asked if i was gay upon entry2, (2) some of the signage:

The cow one remains confusing after multiple attempts at translation with various apps - there’s a part in there about “bipedal walking is strictly prohibited!” which might be part of the kink but it could also mean no couples??

…and finally, (3) the decor including this, uh, toy:

With sufficient effort, technique, and (critically) enthusiasm, these shoot water. Would it be accurate to call this a sex toy? Seems like more of a novelty than a tool for sexual satisfaction. I mean by intention of course, a lot of things could be considered “sex toys” with sufficient creativity/desperation/boldness.

I didn’t stay long. The gentleman I ended up speaking to the most - who couldn’t get enough of the above toy - was a young man in the US Air Force who was on leave and fairly eager to make that leave more permanent. He wanted to spend more time with his husband and his husband’s boyfriend (it’s not that complicated).

  1. I would support building high speed rail between these places explicitly for the purpose of doing this, just for the sheer effect of putting to rest the endless comparisons between these cities. ↩

  2. My standard answers of "uh, sure” or “occasionally” have so far been sufficient to avoid being asked to leave. ↩

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