Happy to report that I started the morning without a yelp of surprise. There’s something about the mattress in a capsule hotel that makes it quite impossible to think you’re waking up anywhere else. It seemed perfectly comfortable when I went to sleep, some gnomes must have come in during the night and taken all the padding out.

The plan for today was simple and straightforward; it was therefore doomed to abject failure.

I planned to hit a couple of tourist attractions in Osaka, head to Okayama, spend some time there, and then be in Kochi by dinner time, sampling regional delicacies along the way.

This might have worked if I hadn’t gotten on completely the wrong subway train at Namba station in Osaka. I thought that i was getting on the “JR Loop Line”, which lives up to its name in that it’s a circuit around Osaka. I was wrong. I actually wound up on a train to Nara, which is not a loop. I didn’t realize this until I started seeing stations that looked more and more “small town” and less urban – I hadn’t been paying attention to station names because, well, I figured that I was on a loop, I just needed to listen for Osaka-eki and I’d be fine.

Long story short – when I realized this, I dashed out the door of one train, directly across the platform into the doors of another train going BACK to Osaka, and lost about an hour in the process.

That minor setback aside, a few other things conspired to make me lose 10 minutes here and there… I had to scale back plans a little. Mostly I dropped my plan to visit Okayama castle, though I may hit it on the way back.

Umeda Sky Building, with its twin towers bridged at the top by an observator, is basically a “get high up and look around” sort of thing. It’s got some impressive views of Osaka and a couple of escalators that you shouldn’t ride if you have any fear of heights – they start at the 34th floor and go OUTSIDE up to the 39th floor, enclosed of course but still…

The observation deck of this tower is open to the elements, though it does have a sort of moat thing that looks like it would prevent anyone from jumping. I’m sure that, in Japan, suicide capital of the known world, that design is PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

There’s a nice little placard, which I failed to photograph, that basically said “don’t wear a hat up here if it’s windy” which I thought was Sound Advice.

Nice views of Osaka, especially of the bridges.

Not knowing Osaka at all kind of cut into the impact of the views – no “I can see my house from here!” factor, you see – but I got to enjoy watching natives point out stuff to each other and get quite animated arguing about what building was what.

From there, I navigated my way back to the subway system – coming FROM Umeda Sky Building, I found the convenient underground tunnel that runs directly from Osaka station to the building, this makes the trip about 10 minutes on foot instead of the 20-30 minutes that it might take someone to get there if they decided to, I don’t know, take the first exit they came to in Osaka station, scan the skyline for their destination, and then try to figue out how to get there using sidewalks. You’d have to be a complete fool to go THAT route.

…

Anyway, subway system, four stops to Osaka Castle Park station. Osaka Castle Park station living up to its name, Osaka Castle is surrounded by a rather nice wooded park full of roaming cats. The feral cat population in Japan is one of the things I find most depressing about the country, but these cats didn’t look too badly off. Some of them were obviously on the prowl for small animals to eat, but there were an equal measure who’d found a spot of shade to lie down in and wait out the midday heat – and they were completely unafraid of people, the most reaction I got from any of them was a half opened eye to say “Yes, I know you’re there.”

Osaka Castle is DAMNED impressive from the outside.

Inside, well, it’s a museum with lots of informative displays about the guy responsible for building it. There’s nothing of the original castle left except for a few outbuildings, the keep itself is a modern reconstruction.

There are two floors of neat artifacts; these are also the floors where photography is prohibited. Did I mention that the museum sells nice photo books of all the artifacts? Do I have to mention this? OK, so the photography prohibition is really there to prevent the artifacts from being destroyed by slow exposure to flashes, but still…

Osaka castle didn’t really take that long to explore. Got a few photos that will hopefully be desktop-background-quality. I had some takoyaki at a small booth on the grounds of the castle – and I survived the experience, though I wouldn’t go out of my way to repeat it – and got back on the subway to Shin-Osaka station where I could catch a shinkansen to Okayama.

Okayama was where I started to feel well and truly off the map. This is unfair – the city is on a great many maps, even some that aren’t necessarily all that detailed – but it’s the first place I’ve been that speaking Japanese has seemed less like an affection and more like a survival skill. That is to say, this is the first city I’ve gotten to where the clerk at the JR counter has hit me with the “Oh my god I have to talk to a gaijin” face instead of the “Oh, time to bust out the English skills” face.

Nonetheless, she got me a ticket to Kochi and I had 45 minutes to kill.

Now, Okayama claims that it’s Momotaro’s hometown, and as such it has two regional specialties. The first is peaches, the second is a candy called kibi dango, which Momotaro is reputed to have fed to his animal friends before they went and whomped up on ogres.

I found peaches in the produce section of the station supermarket. I could have gotten a six pack of – admittedly gorgeous looking – peaches for right around $50.

That was a little rich for my blood. A small box of kibi dango set me back Y380 which was much more reasonable.

Eating a small box of kibi dango while on a 2.5 hour train ride is a good way to wind up with a horribly upset stomach, by the way. That somewhat negative aspect aside, it tastes an awful lot like botan rice candy and has the consistency of rather soft marshmallows. Not impressed, but you have to eat the regional specialty, right?

The train from Okayama to Kochi goes past some amazing scenery, both manmade and natural. The bridge between the two islands is six miles long, and it is quite startling to see massive container ships passing under the bridge and looking quite small. It’s hard to get a sense of the thing even when you’re on it; it’s one of those things that really makes you appreciate the kind of people who have the right sort of brains for mechanical engineering on a massive scale.

After you cross the bridge and wind up on Shikoku, you get to the natural scenery part of the ride; mile after mile of forested mountains punctuated by occasional bursts of civilization and cultivated fields. For a while, we were following a river – no idea on the name – that had absolutely stunning emerald water and tons of rapids, it was criminal how difficult it was to take any photographs from a moving train.

Got to Kochi around 8 PM, booked a room at the Comfort Hotel Kochi, changed, grabbed an area map and hit the streets. My goal was to get some photographs of Kochi castle at night, and I wasn’t about to be deterred by little things like not knowing where it was and never having been in Kochi before. It turned out to be about a half hour walk. Of course, the castle itself was long since closed up for the day, but nobody seemed to mind or actually notice me wandering the grounds and taking pictures. Hopefully some of them turn out all right.

Still nursing my upset stomach, I decided to hit a Lawson’s, get a katsu set microwaved by the helpful shop, and retreat back to my room instead of trying to sample Kochi’s regional delicacy, which is a sort of barely-cooked tuna dish. Maybe I’ll be up for it for lunch.