hamamatsu and osaka
we started our day relatively early in hamamatsu, needing to check out of the airbnb around 9:30. i woke up this morning with a very mild soreness in the back of my throat.
[o m i n o u s f o r e s h a d o w i n g]
the owner of the airbnb was quite nice, he even gave us a ride to the nearest train station. he told us today was a lucky day for him, and that after he dropped us off he was going to a meeting to buy another house to turn into an airbnb. get that bag, atsutoshi-san. get that bag.
the plan today was to store our luggage in some coin lockers and explore hamamatsu some more, then catch a train to osaka.
we are really playing things way more fast and loose than i typically do on these trips. i have historically bought all my train tickets for the entire trip at once, or at least on the same day. but our strategy this time has mostly been to just show up at the train station around the time we want to leave and just buy tickets for the next train. and it has worked out just fine. it would be even easier solo. i think i will just start doing this for future trips.
exploring hamamatsu
we took a train from the closest station to hamamatsu station (where the bullet train will leave from). we looked for coin lockers and found just barely enough for everyone else’s luggage to fit. but the large size lockers that i would need for my suitcase were all currently in-use.
so we brainstormed for a bit, and i learned that you can apparently pay to store luggage at 7-elevens in japan. so we walked about a mile or so to the nearest 7-eleven and paid them to hold my suitcase for me for a few hours.
our next stop was a musical instrument museum. apparently, hamamatsu is the birthplace of a ton of very internationally famous companies. yamaha, suzuki, honda, roland, and kawai are all from hamamatsu. it is known as the “city of music” due to all the huge musical instrument manufacturers that come from here. so it made sense to go check out the musical instrument museum.
it was about a 10 minute walk from the 7-eleven i just dropped my suitcase at. but we headed there and found out it is currently undergoing renovations and is not open. but we didn’t let that get us down, we pivoted and decided to catch a cab to the yamaha museum instead.
the building is really beautiful and absolutely gigantic. this might be the largest building i have ever seen in japan, besides like, the airport.
unfortunately, this is all we got to see because they were sold out of tickets.
but we didn’t let that get us down, we pivoted and decided to catch a cab (the same one actually, the guy was still in the parking lot waiting for a ride) to the suzuki museum instead.
suzuki museum
they say the third time’s the charm, and this place was actually open and allowed us to go inside. it is directly across the street from what i believe is suzuki headquarters. but there is a pretty massive wall around that building, so you can’t see much of it.
this museum was really interesting. suzuki makes a lot of stuff, so i kind of expected it to be much more surface level than it actually was.
they have a bunch of suzuki cars and motorcycles on display from the history of the company, and several exhibits on the exact process they use to manufacture them.
they even completely inexplicably have a car signed by elton john?
there seems to be a weird almost “hero worship” of osamu suzuki, the chairman and ceo of suzuki motor corporation from 1978-2021. there is a like ~50 foot wide and ~7 foot tall wall covered in random quotes of his. you can actually read some of them here.
my favorite is probably:
“existential crises and product lifetimes both come in 25 year cycles.”
this museum was way cooler than i expected it to be, and i learned a lot from it. i didn’t know suzuki was originally a company that made weaving looms for the japanese silk industry. in 1929, the founder of that company decided “we should make a car” and then just… did it. then during world war 2, they were forced to halt manufacturing cars due to the government declaring consumer vehicles non-essential.
then, in the post war boom, textile markets exploded due to newly imported american cotton. and there was a huge demand for affordable consumer transportation. many people in japan were using small motors you could clip on to a regular bicycle. suzuki saw that trend and built something else, a bicycle with a motor already attached called the “power free”. you could use it with pedals like a normal bike, or use the engine to augment the pedaling, or remove the pedals entirely and have a little motorcycle. this project was so successful that he changed the name of the company to suzuki motor co.
after the huge success of the power free, they decided to try again with making cars. in 1955, they made a car called the suzulight, which (per wikipedia) came with “front-wheel drive, four-wheel independent suspension and rack-and-pinion steering, which were not common on cars until three decades later.”
its kinda crazy to me that a guy in 1929 running a very successful loom manufacturing company could just say “i think i want to make a car” and then do it and be incredibly successful despite the hardships of the time he decided to do it at.
ramen
it was time to head back to the station and get our luggage before heading onward to osaka.
once we had all our stuff, tsukasa told us his favorite ramen restaurant was located inside the station very close to our train gate. so we of course had to go in.
this isn’t the best ramen i have ever had, but it is really damn close. the meat in there is pork loin. i’d say this is probably the third best ramen i’ve ever had. the only things that beat it are the tenri stamina ramen from nara last year, and the ramen place in kyoto with the fried chicken, also from last year. and this was 1,290 yen. $8.
onward to osaka
it was finally time to say goodbye to hamamatsu. we hopped on a train to osaka to continue our journey west. i made a pretty big mistake here, but it ended up being fine. i bought different train tickets from the rest of the group, because i need a seat with “oversized luggage storage”, and i also prefer to buy tickets in the more expensive “green car” because i am 6’4 and need the extra leg room. so i get on the train a decent distance away from the group.
we stopped at my platform on the way to theirs, and i kinda went on autopilot and just walked onto the next train that pulled up. turns out that wasn’t our train at all. i didnt notice until about 25 minutes later when someone from the train staff came and asked to see my ticket, which is something i have never had happen before. when i showed it to him, he just nodded and said thank you in english and walked away. then about 10 minutes later, a different person came out with the google translate open telling me i am on the wrong train and need to get off the train in nagoya. thankfully, this train is still going the correct direction, so it isn’t a huge error.
i got off the train in nagoya and went to track down a member of the station staff to explain what happened. they pointed at a sign and told me which train i need to get on. they said i have to get on car 1 or 2, because those are “non-reserved” seats. you can get a bullet train much cheaper if you take these cars, where there is no assigned seating and you just grab whatever seat you can find. i told them that i couldn’t do that because of my large suitcase, and was told “it will be ok, just talk to train staff”.
so i got on the correct train and looked for some train staff. but i couldn’t find any. the train left the station and i was in between cars 1 and 2 unsure where to go at this point. i cant just go to a random seat in the non reserved section because there isn’t a place to put my gigantic suitcase. and even if i did do that, i checked both cars and the train was at 100% capacity.
so i just kinda did the most awkward thing you can do, and stood in the little room between cars where the exit door is and stood there waiting for 90 minutes while the train went to osaka. its kind of difficult to do that, as the trains go like 200mph. but i thugged it out, it was fine. all in all, i arrived at shin-osaka station less than 15 minutes later than the correct train would have.
shin-osaka is an absolutely menacing place. it isn’t the size of a small city like shinjuku station, but the sheer volume of people walking through it at all times can be a little overwhelming.
while the gang took trains to get to the airbnb, i said screw this and caught a cab that only cost $27. i beat them to the airbnb by like a half hour. i guess their trains were extremely packed too. i think i won here. they could have taken the cab with me and made it cost like $6.50 each, but didn’t want to wait in the line that seemed way too long (it was like 9 minutes). they probably spent $3 each on the train too. so i definitely won here. check out the view from the airbnb’s balcony:
in contrast with tokyo, osaka has such a different vibe. there is a layer of grime over this city that makes it feel closer to home. in a lot of ways osaka feels like the japanese version of downtown san diego to me. where tokyo tends to be very clean and efficient, or maybe businesslike, osaka feels a lot more like a city people party and have fun in. it feels like a young people city. i really love osaka.
stand up comedy
after we set all our bags down and decompressed from the travel experience, we headed back out towards a comedy club our friend found, which apparently does english stand up comedy. i never would have even thought to look up something like standup comedy in japan, because i would just assume it would be in japanese. but it turns out there is an english comedy club a couple blocks away, fittingly named osaka comedy club.
this was a very small basement below a bar. there were 13 people at this show, the four of us included.
they had three different comedians come up, and all of them were extremely funny. i find it really interesting that stand up comedy has evolved over the past decade or so to be heavily focused on crowdwork. comedians like gianmarco soresi and jeff arcuri are blowing up online from crowdwork clips, and i think that kind of thing has just infiltrated the standup space really quickly. this show was no exception, all three comedians spent at least half of their time on stage doing crowdwork.
highly recommend this place if you are ever in osaka.
dotonbori
you cannot go to osaka without checking out dotonbori. this place is absolutely wild. the “people per square foot” has to be higher here than most of the world. it is absolutely crammed full of people on these narrow streets and canals. i got one of the best photos i’ve ever taken here. kind of an exaggeration of what it feels like to be this tall in japan.
dotonbori is great. little food stalls and restaurants everywhere, if you can handle the crowds. and its really fascinating that you can be on a street where you can see over 1,000 people no matter which way you face, and then walk one block away and have the street all to yourself.
we poked around a bit looking for a place to eat, and eventually settled on a tiny restaurant off the beaten path, where we ate yakiniku and ochazuke, and ordered the largest glasses of beer we have ever seen.
you ever seen the fellowship of the ring? it felt like this:
this was a great meal. after this, we walked our friend back to his station and headed back to the airbnb. i only got one more picture, and this was like an 8 second walk from the front foor of our airbnb. dotonbori way off in the distance along the aptly named dotonbori river.
