In which we do Osaka

The CliffsNotes recap of the weekend:

• Arrival of the gadget twins
• It all started in a bar
• Shadow and the attack of the funk
• Death in the evening. One shrimp too many.
• Hypothetically speaking, if we climbed Mt. Shosha…
• Roll you own Okonomiyaki
• Jerks

And now, I will write some words and connect them with dots! Marvel at the spectacle! Be amazed at the misuse of simple punctuation! Count the commas!

Part 1: We explore the big city

The second three day long weekend in as many weeks meant more time for misbehaving. Three days of it, in fact. It sounds terrible but after two days of work immediately after returning from Taiwan, I was all ready to jump on the next plane to anywhere and get the fuck out. Sometimes you’re just not in the Japan headspace and this long weekend was when I planned to re-fall in love with Japan, or at least rekindle my enthusiasm enough to last me until my next chance to flee the country for a while.

The best way to do that? Rock out. Friday night was the “We Love Music” gig in Osaka with DJ Shadow, Keb Darge, Electric Indigo, Steve Rachmad, Marco Passarini and a bunch of others. Huge line-up, 4000 yen and I’d never seen Shadow play live before. I was pretty stoked for this gig and it had been my shining light at the end of the tunnel for most of the week. That was Friday night though, first we have to introduce the supporting cast for the rest of the weekends festivities.

Fellow Lawleyite Zac and his housemate Tony landed in Japan the previous weekend for their very own whirlwind tour. We’d arranged to hook up for the weekend so I trucked into Osaka to meet them in the morning. While Osaka station isn’t quite Shinjuku, it still has an obscene number of exits, hidden corridors, dead-ends and a distinct lack of pay phones. So I wandered in randomly in circles around Osaka waiting for Zac to call me and let me know where he was. I’d completely forgotten how much of a pain in the ass arranging a meeting location without mobile phones is. Eventually we managed to work it all out, meet up, and then spent roughly the next hour trying to find lockers big enough to store Z&T’s gargantuan bags. I swear these guys must have funded their holiday by smuggling refugee families into Japan, because they probably could have fit about sixteen people in each of their bags. Travelling light they were not.

Once the bags were stowed away, we busted out the tourist hats and headed up the Umeda Sky Building for 33rd floor escalators, open air viewing platform and, bizarrely, a Mexican wrestling exhibition. That done, it was into Namba and a visit to the Sammy’s Ebisu Plaza, a three storey indoor recreation of a Taisho-era Japanese shopping mall, complete with about a billion stalls selling everything from Octopus balls to Dim Sum. We ended up eating spicy Korean noodles sold by a guy that coincidentally lived right next to my night school in Kobe. After face stuffing, we left Namba for Shinsaibashi did retail therapy at Apple, wowed at Gloomy bear and the street punks and then met Glebe in Tokyu Hands. Our three person Lawley reunion was cut short when we decided to split for America-mura to meet with the rest of the crew going to Shadow. Of the seven people that met at Triangle park, six were from Perth, we appear to be taking over Hyogo prefecture at a fairly rapid pace.

This narrative will be continued in the next exciting installment, “DJ Shadow: Wanker” same time tomorrow.

Posted in Japan on Monday September 26, 2005.