Yesterday was a tough day so yet again we promised ourselves an easy morning today. We did a few odds and ends, including getting our washing up-to-date in our hotel's coin washer/dryer. It was raining lightly outside and the forecast was for rain all day so we didn't feel in a rush to go out.
However, we set off before lunch and walked to Osaka Castle. I have been reading the book Shogun which mentions this castle extensively, particularly in terms of how impregnable it was in the 16th and 17th centuries. Power struggles between the samurai feudal lords were very fierce during this period. As soon as we arrived at the outer wall of the castle we were in awe of the massive blocks of stone used in the fortifications. There is an outer as well as an inner moat (though some of the latter is now filled in) and rows of huge towering walls made of utterly enormous stones. These stones weighed up to 108 tons and 60 sq m in size. Manoeuvring them into the right place, at the right angles, must have been an incredible exercise in strength and ingenuity.
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| A turret structure on the edge of the outer wall of the castle complex. |
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| The outer wall - precise angles and huge corner blocks. |
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| One of the giant blocks of stone on an inner wall. |
The castle itself has been ravaged by fire a few times since it was built in the 16th century, with the latest rebuild being in 1931 in concrete, with tweaks in 1997. We didn't bother to go into it because it's totally modern inside, but it was great wandering around the grounds.
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| The castle itself |
Lunch was another experience. It was one of those places you need to order at a machine that takes your money and issues a ticket which you hand to the chef. The menus were fine with the help of Google, but then it was a matter of matching the kanji on the menu to those on the Japanese-only machine. The owner/chef realised our difficulty and came out to help us - we also needed to choose hot versus cold for the noodles which we hadn't realised. All sorted with a few laughs, and a simple cheap meal was at the counter in minutes.
Hopping over the road to the Osaka Historical Museum, and whizzing up to the 10th floor in the lift, it was possible to get a brilliant view of the entire castle complex. We happily spent an hour or more going through the museum, where a huge effort had been put into displays depicting the history of Osaka. These included archaeological excavations, dioramas of the castle and city during different eras, explanations of typical daily life and so on. Some of the models were really large and certainly impressive.
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| The castle complex is inside the moat on the left. |
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| Models of court officials in the 17th century |
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| Dioramas of scenes in the 16th and 17th centuries |
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| A copper smelting workshop |
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| A noh theatre |
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| A parade float |
The light rain had stopped when we emerged outside again at 4pm. We are both very interested in the Japanese artform called ukiyo-e, which flourished during the 17th-19th centuries. Artists during this period created woodblock prints and paintings, often of travel scenes and landscapes. We bought a print on our last trip to Japan of a scene on our walk along the Nakasendo Way. We'd like to get one this time for the walk we did last week along the Tokaido Way. Unfortunately the Ukiyo-e Museum closed at 5pm today, but we hotfooted it the 3+km there anyway, arriving at 4.45pm so we could look through the museum store. No luck, but we will definitely zero-in on a Ukiyo-e store in Tokyo when we get there.
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| A typical Ukiyo-e woodblock print |
Tonight was our last chance to visit the Dotonbori district, famous for its nightlife and eateries. Signs on many of the buildings light up at night and the area is famous in Osaka. We continued walking until we got there and took a few photos. However, it wasn't quite dark so we hunted around for somewhere to savour a beer for a wee while. No matter how many streets we walked down, they appeared to be crowded with eateries but not a simple drinking-only bar in sight. Some were upstairs but we wanted to be streetside so we could see all the activity going on in the streets. It was very busy, and queues were forming outside many of the eateries well before 6pm. There literally did not seem to be any pure bars. Every place was selling food as well, so to get a beer you really had to sit at a table and therefore order some food as well.
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| Dotonburi district |
Neither of us was hungry so in the end we gave it away. We felt we'd got a reasonable impression of the place, and uncomfortably felt as though we were 3x older than most of those sauntering around. The anticipation of putting our feet up, picking up some bits at the local supermarket to make a meal in our hotel room, including a cold beer, won hands down. With a fairly short train ride back, we were home by 7pm, and our feet had weathered another 17km. An early night looms for tonight ..........
