Photos from Osaka

A trip to Japan in 2007

These photos were taken on the way to Osaka, and in and around Osaka and Kyoto, in February of 2007. Click here to view the corresponding blog entry.


O'Hare Airport in Chicago, after arriving from Montreal.


Lunch in Chicago.


This is where things started to get messy. This is still in Chicago. It looks like the weather was quite nice, but the airport was still recovering from a huge snowstorm the previous day (which had melted by the time I took this photo). The snowstorm had forced the airport to cancel over a thousand flights, so it was pretty chaotic. I got bumped back so that I wasn't able to fly out until about ten hours after I was originally scheduled to leave, and I was lucky by comparison.


San Francisco airport, early the next morning.


Leaving Vancouver International. Although you can't see it very well, the town on the water in the center of the photo is Nanaimo, British Columbia.


Ski hills down below the plane.


Dinner on Air Canada. We had two meals on the flight to Japan, and I was really impressed by the quality of them, considering that we ate several hours after the food had come on board. For the first meal, I had a rice & chicken dinner with a sushi dessert, and for this one, I had the beef & vegetables with a fruit dessert.


Flying past Mount Fuji.


A view from inside one of the clubs that I was playing in, taken from the DJ booth and showing part of the dance floor with a huge projection screen in the background. I took this photo on Friday, but I wasn't playing until the following evening.


Lychee liquor - which is sort of a fruit based liqueur.


This was a bottle of a green tea cream-based liqueur. I hope I can find this in Canada, because I tried some before I went out on Friday night, and it was really good.


And here is one of those drinks.


A photo of Jason with Ian Warney, a DJ and friend of mine from university. Ian is now teaching English in Osaka.


A display rack of energy drinks. The Japanese definitely love their energy drinks.


A taxi driver. He didn't speak any English.


I spent some time walking around downtown Osaka on Friday evening.


Back alleys are much, much safer in Japan than in North America, and crime is almost unknown in Japan, by comparison.


A sign advertising a number of bars in an underground area. In many places, there are just a large number of small bars all in a group, rather than one large bar.


A sign for another club.


I had to take a few photos of various vending machines. The Japanese LOVE their vending machines, and you can buy just about anything from them. Many of the machines that sell beverages have hot and cold sections, so it is easy to get a hot coffee and a cold beer from the same machine.


A food display outside a restaurant. Again, I had to take photos of the food displays outside several establishments. Many restaurants will get colorful wax replicas constructed of all the dishes on their menu, so people walking by on the street can see what the food is supposed to look like. It also makes it easy for foreigners to order, since you can just point at the dish that you want to try.


A liquor store.


A downtown street.



This foreigner had a little bit too much to drink. We were actually sitting and eating for about fifteen minutes before I turned around and noticed him passed out on the floor behind me. After I took a photo of him, a couple of the staff noticed what I was doing and came over and started laughing at him, so they carried him outside so he could sleep on a bench in front of their restaurant.


Ian, posing for the camera in a "toy" shop.


A pair of Japanese girls in costume, just hanging out on the street corner.


Ulala, admiring an enormous Bailey's bottle.



A giant octopus on the side of a building.


A fast food menu, Japanese style.


An old poster of an event at Triangle.


A view of one side of Osaka from the apartment that I was staying in, taken on Saturday afternoon. The building was pretty tall, so the view was good. The view at night, the previous evening, had been incredible, but photos couldn't do it justice.



A line of vending machines.


A delivery truck.


In the Osaka train station. The Osaka train system is a bit more confusing than most cities that I've been in, since there are a whole lot of separate lines which are owned by different companies, and all the fares are different depending on which line you are on, and how far you're going. And of course, since the signs are mostly in Japanese, it gets even more confusing.


KFC and MacDonalds are everywhere - the only Western chains that I really saw in Osaka.


We stopped for tea downtown. The bottle on the right was a liquid sugar.


"Fast Food," sushi and snacks, at a convenience store.


More wax food displays outside another restaurant.


The Colonel, once again.


This was taken in the NHK building - a national Japanese television station. You can see the show being filmed in front of a small audience in the room, and the simultaneous live network feeds on the TV screens at the top of the photo.


This is a full-size Domokun. He is a mascot for NHK, who apparently landed on earth from space. The story goes that the first word he heard in Japan was "domo," which means "thank you," and that is where he got his name from. Although he looks like he wants to eat small kittens, he is supposed to be a "good" character.


A pigeon.


A very old tree.


Osaka Castle. This castle is located in the center of the city, and is surrounded by an enormous moat.


A tourist train.


A Shinto shrine. Shintoism did not formally start out as a religion, but in olden times was more a collection of local beliefs that mostly centered around respect for the natural world. Shinto shrines usually display the same basic shape that you can see here. Shintoism and Buddhism (a true religion), often exist side by side in Japanese culture. Buddhism features temples, not shrines.


Enormous jugs of sake (rice wine), which will be consumed in the future at various ceremonies at the Buddhist temple.


A rock - unfortunately, I am not aware of its special significance.


Buddhist temple.



A monk.



I found these railings to be especially interesting. They look like wood, but they are actually molded concerete, designed and painted to look like some sort of cottonwood or something similar.



Some sort of flowers.


The weather was so nice that there were flowers blooming everywhere.



A license plate.


Another view inside the train station, at one of the ticket banks.


This is an overhead view of a small model replica of the Osaka Castle.


At a train station.


I could not figure out this advertisement.


Everybody loves bread.


Information about subway times. The Japanese are incredibly unforgiving of people who are late, so the train and subway schedules, which are detailed down to the exact minute, are very accurate.


Waiting for a train, on the way to Kyoto for the afternoon.


This was some sort of race, where competitors had to run up to the top of the stairs. It was raining quite hard, so all these people in the raincoats were sweepers who were trying to keep the stairs slightly less wet. Needless to say, we watched quite a few competitors do some pretty hard face plants as they were running up the slippery stairs.


I have no idea what this giant sphere was for.


A taxi lineup.


More wax food displays.


Some sort of silly kids' umbrella, hanging upside down in a shop.


One of my friends, Jessica, said that Norah Jones is one of her favorite singers, so I had to take a photo of this poster.


A nice bench and waiting area outside a random restaurant.


Paintings of the gods of Thunder (left) and Wind (right) on a building in Kyoto.



Good fortune tablets hanging outside a temple.


This kimono in a store window lists for nine thousand dollars. That's not a typo.


This was in Kyoto (the city is very close to Osaka), and we spent most of the afternoon walking around and looking at temple and shrines and other interesting parts of the city.


This is a "fortune wall." Each of the pieces of paper tied to this fence is a fortune that someone got at the temple.


Believe it or not, this is a cherry tree, starting to blossom in February (very early) because the weather had been so warm.


Myself, with Ulala.




The entrance to another Shinto shrine.


A statue of an animal.


Some ducks.


More ducks. There are actually five ducks in this photo, although you cannot see one of the female ducks, which is underneath the mallard (the male duck in the center). Aflac, eat your heart out.



An Austin-Mini. The parking spaces are quite interesting. Space is obviously at a premium in many parts of Japan, so the parking spaces have platforms that rise up and down and sink into the ground, which means that two cars can park in the same space, with one underground and one at street level when the "elevator" is down.


Big Buddha.


Here, Ulala is putting an incense stick into a special monument.


If I remember correctly, this statue commemorated the year of the monkey.


Walking around, sight-seeing.


Pinwheels, commemorating young childen.


A photo of a urinal that I couldn't pass up - "Toto, you're not in Kansai anymore."







A couple of big fish.


A print of a dancing squirrel.


A giant fossil.


A machine in a donut shop that made cute little sweet donuts, as the customer ordered them.


Ceremonial swords.



A ticket to the Kiyomizo Temple.


A small dragon.


The Kiyomizo Temple is built over the side of a large hill, rather than into the hill itself. The entire temple is built on enormous wooden stilts and support beams.


Another photo of the Kiyomizo Temple from another angle.


This photo shows water coming from underground springs near the Kiyomizo Temple. Visitors are supposed to reach out and catch some of the water with the long-handled cups, and use it to wash their hands and mouth to help purify themselves.


This photo at the base of the Temple shows just how massive the structure is, and how complex the support system is.


A street in Kyoto.


Supper time.


These next photos were taken at the Oasis Lounge, where I played on Saturday night. This is Dan, owner, mixing a drink.


Ian, playing at the club.


This is Nobu, who is a former Mr. Japan body-building national champion.


Dan, with a couple of his customers.


Lee, a DJ who is originally from Canada, with Erik Archer. Erik runs the Bike Club Osaka website and promotional network.


Me, picking another record.


Ian, dancing.


Dan, having some shots of Jagermeister.


Shaun Young, advertising a can of Shark energy drink.


In case my clothes were dirty, the hotel had a "laundly room." There were even some nice marble engravings elsewhere in the hotel that said the same thing. It appears that the Japanese have problems differentiating between R's and L's sometimes. I would like to learn to speak Japanese, although it seems to be a moderately hard language to me.


Instructions on how to use the toilet in the hotel. It was pretty high-tech.


These phones are pretty high-tech. They receive TV broadcasts, so when you open the phone, you can swivel the screen around to set it to "landscape" orientation, to make it easier to watch.


Osaka on Sunday evening.




When we were walking downtown on Sunday night, I ran into Kyohei, just out of the blue. Kyohei went to the same university in Canada that I did, but I didn't expect to run into him when I was visiting (considering that Osaka has about nine million people).


Model figurines of some sort of village scene.


A view of Osaka at night, taken from the top of the Umeda Sky Building.



Another photo from the Sky Building.


Myself, with Kevin & Danielle, two friends from Halifax who are teaching English in Japan.


A three-wheeled mini truck.


Ulala, looking at a giant ceremonial mask.


Baked corn potato french fry poster.




A bright green "melon" pop.


Dinner on Sunday evening. We ate at Fugetsu, up in the top of the Hankyu Grand Building. It was interesting, because the meal was cooked on a large hot plate built right into our table.


Here is the food, being prepared by the waiter/cook.


I had an oyster & shrimp cabbage dish, which looks a little scary, but was really quite tasty.


Downtown Osaka.


A pachinko parlour. Gambling for money is illegal in Japan, but many people play pachinko for toy tokens, and then there are stores near the pachinko parlours which will buy the tokens that you win.


Here, Ian and Kevin are playing some sort of video game where the object is to beat on big drums.


Another video game, with some pretty nice graphics.



This looked pretty interesting - I was tempted to go in and try some "Ilish" beer.


A Christmas themed "love hotel."


I believe that this pennant was supposed to be showing the lyrics from "The Rose," by Bette Midler.


A poster outside a hostess bar.



I think this was supposed to be a giant perogie.


Our bartender, Hashi, at Captain Kangaroos. He is holding a large bottle of Shochu, which is a sort of wine made from baked sweet potatos. I stuck to beer.


Leaving Osaka, on the way to Tokyo.