A Little Taste of Home (?)

The first week of school, I got my keitai (cell phone). It’s amazingly cool, and texting is only 300 yen per month for unlimited, or so I understood. And it has a million pictures to add to your messages, including your normal anime faces, all kinds of food, planes, cars, a ghost, a monkey, an octopus and a really cute little whale.

These last two came in handy when I was making plans to go to the Osaka Aquarium on my second weekend in town. Unfortunately, the friend I was meeting didn’t have a cell phone yet, and I missed her at the station by about 15 minutes. If only I had waited a little longer…

But I knew a couple of other friends were headed to a place called Amerika-mura, which I understood to be the “America-town” of Osaka, like Chinatown at home. I heard there was an enormous bookstore there, and I was planning on going at some point anyway. So I headed to campus to get on the computer for awhile and sent them a text to find out when they were going to meet up.

At the CIE, I walked into the door. Literally. These are automatic doors, but they move much slower than in America, and of course I wasn’t watching where I was going. Fortunately, there was a group of Japanese girls standing right inside to ask me if I was OK and probably to laugh at me when I walked away.

I met up with Cailyn and Kelly a little later and we took the trains to downtown Osaka. Kelly had been there with a friend before, and knew the area, if somewhat roughly. We got off the subway and headed the way the map appeared to point us. There were a bunch of designer stores, such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci along this road. We stayed clear of them…

Did I mention it was raining? Our shoes were soaked. We saw a sign for a pizza parlor in a covered arcade and decided it sounded excellent. Shakey’s Viking Pizza Buffet. Viking? Awesome. It was about $10 with a drink, but we were hungry enough to eat $10 of pizza. The little Japanese hostess ran back to the kitchen and let them know a bunch of Americans had just come in and they needed to put several pizzas on to keep the buffet stocked. Heh heh.

The pizza looked delicious. And it didn’t surprise me at all that there was a piece loaded with corn. Americans eat corn on everything, right? They had potatoes too, and ketchup to put on them. Like my usual suave self, I managed to domino the ketchup bottles and knock one all the way back in the kitchen where it probably splattered all over the floor. Yay. I ran back to the table to eat.

We walked for a little while through the covered arcade and found an awesome CD store, and an equally cool sock store. There they have all kinds of socks. It says so on the sign. You can also see the sign for Shakey’s in the background to the left.

After deciding we were pointed in the wrong direction, we sloshed back to the subway to look at the map again, and found our way to Amerika-mura, passing an almost eerily flashy pachinko parlor on the way. We probably passed several, because pachinko parlors are literally every several hundred feet.

Fashion is the main product in Amerika-mura. Even in the rain, we could see the outrageous outfits under the umbrellas of the other people walking around. Flashy, bright and hip clothes matched those in the hundreds of clothing stores along the stretch of road.

Up high on a building seen from the little blob of sidewalk called Triangle Park is a replica of the statue of liberty. This is just like America, right…? Amerika, that is.

We quickly found Mandarake, the bookstore I had heard about, which was four floors packed with Otaku (anime nerd) memorabilia. I felt completely at home here.

After basking in the shelves upon shelves of manga and picking up a few souvenirs for myself and others, we headed up to the fourth floor, where there was a cosplay café. The waitresses were dressed as characters we couldn’t quite remember, and even some of the fellow anime fans eating there were cosplaying. I felt a little out of place without a costume, although I could have bought one on the floor below if I really felt like it.

I got a little chocolate cake, which was delicious if a little overpriced. But in a place such as this, the atmosphere was worth the little higher price. It was definitely an experience I wouldn’t find back home.

I arrived back home in time that night to watch part of a samurai drama with Okaa-san. I’m not sure what exactly was going on, but it was pretty intense. Japanese TV is much more interesting than back home, especially without all the reality shows.

Next weekend we would get five days off. I was SO excited. First, we would try the aquarium again.