it’s kind of annoying that I don’t feel up to the task of pretending that I can’t read the notice on the inside of my capsule here; the one that says “no food or drink”, in Kanji of course.

I can’t actually read all of it, but I can get “eat” and “drink” and “inside the capsule” and I can kind of grok the rest from context.

There’s also no wireless internet, which is actually maybe not such a bad thing. I fear for the sanctity of this PC if it hooks up to a network before I’ve had a chance to really lock it down some.

Yes, I’m in a capsule hotel in Osaka, partially because it’s a pretty cheap way to spend a night and mostly because I got tired of people asking me if I’d ever stayed in one. So far it’s not so bad; the pajamas they provided don’t fit my lanky gaijin bones but that’s about it. Oh, and I can’t eat or drink of course. Did I mention that the bathrooms are all Japanese style? This marks the first time I haven’t been able to find a Western bathroom, and it’s an unsettling experience. I managed not to embarrass myself, but, well, it’s, uh, one more thing I can claim to have managed and I’ll leave it at that.

Let’s put the negatives aside. It was Y2700 for the night and that’s hard to beat without sleeping in a manga cafe.

My capsule is clean and smoke free, with plenty of room to stretch out, a surprise at 6’1″.

I have a radio and a TV, the radio reception is horrid but the TV works fine – It gets about a dozen channels, two of them are porn. There’s a lounge where I can go hang out, smoke, buy sake and play mahjong. All the comforts a salaryman on the road needs, I suppose. I find myself wondering; this is one of the rare capsule hotels with a wing for women, do they get the same porn channels or do they get their own? I’ve been around too many fujoshi lately, it’s corrupting me.

Today started mighty early; leaving the blinds and window open to let in the sounds of the Tokyo morning saw to that. I was up at 5:30, dressed and bathed and breakfasted by 7;00, sitting around waiting for the currency exchange desk to open after that. Made it to Tokyo station around 8:45 and was on my first Shinkansen at 9:03.

The trip to Nagoya was a quiet 2 hour trip through rice fields, punctuated by occasional city. It’s really quite difficult to get photographs out the window of a moving Shinkansen – the time you have from seeing something interesting to turning on the camera to centering the viewfinder on it is pretty short.

Nagoya was, well, it was quite enjoyable. I didn’t spend much time there, only enough to figure out the subway system and navigate myself to the second of Patrica Martin’s Three Holy Sites of Japan: Osu, but I had some excellent food and had a pleasant conversation with a Japanese gentleman who stopped me to figure out if I’d lost my group and needed any help. He turned out to be a history professor who occasionally has to teach exchange students, so his English was excellent. I still took the opportunity to get in some Japanese practice and he seemed tickled by it.

He gave me one of the handouts he’d prepared for his class, scolded me because I’d confessed to how few kanji I could write, and wished me a good time roaming around.

That diversion behind me, I was off to Osu.

Osu is a shopping district right next to Osu Kannon, which is a big Buddhist temple. For the sake of having some photographs I can show at work when I get back, I hit the temple grounds for some quick shots before diving in to the shopping district.

It’s no Akihabara. That’s not really an indictment, though: nothing is Akihabara but Akihabara. There’s a ton of fanboy-oriented stores and PC parts shops, but there’s more “normal” stores than either – most of them seem to exist only to supply the endless stream of weird T-shirts that the populace demands. The overall effect is kind of appealing, you can geek out to your heart’s content but you can also take a break from it if you choose. The biggest difference is the lack of maid cafes.

I wound up getting my sister a souvenir and myself a couple of CDs from the Nagoya branch of Gamers. This led to a small triumph over the forces of evil, not that the Gamers staff is really EVIL or anything… When they asked me if I had a Point card, I said no, and then I asked if I could have one.

They said that this would require me to fill out a form with my address and phone number.

I said that I didn’t live in Japan.

I thought that would be the end of it, and I was prepared to accept a “Sorry, Japanese only” at that point; I’d tried after all.

Instead, the cashier went for the phone, had a conversation on the phone, hung up, called a second person, had a short conversation, went over to another person in the shop and came back with a form after a final conversation with THEM.

He said “fill out your foreign address and phone number”

It was the normal Japanese form, not a special one for foreigners, so I did my best to make a US address fit in the fields and who knows if I’ll ever actually get any junk mail – the important thing is that he took the form, wrote some stuff on it, and handed me a point card.

Minor victory accomplished, it was time to eat.

Wikitravel’s Nagoya entry says that Nagoya’s signature food is something called misokatsu, and I figured that I would give it a try: I likes me some miso and I likes me some katsu, so the two together, how can that go wrong?

It took me a little doing to FIND somewhere offering Nagoya’s signature food. For a signature food, I sure looked at an awful lot of restaurants before finding one that admitted to making misokatsu, and it was a tiny tiny hole in the wall with chairs and tables that seemed small even for the Japanese frame. Sitting down, I came close to lifting the table off the floor with my knees.

I negotiated an order of misokatsu with the waitress and sat back to wait.

I noticed that, of the other 5 people to order between the time I entered and the time I got my order, four of them also ordered misokatsu, so Wikitravel seems to be right that those Nagoyans sure like their misokatsu. This was a good sign, I thought, temporarily forgetting that the Japanese eat a great many things that I do not consider food.

My lunch arrived, and it had a huge bowl of rice, a noodle dish, some pickles, some squash, and a carefully presented Katsu covered in a terrifying black sludge. I swear it looked like it wanted to leap from the plate, go straight through my eyes on its way to my brain, and turn me into a mindless puppet of my alien masters.

On the other hand, the cook was between me and the door, and I knew he had knives, so I tried it.

It was yummy. Thank heavens for that, I don’t want to think about how unpleasant the whole experience would have been otherwise.

Misokatsu enjoyed, I retraced my steps to the station, bought another ticket, and I was on my way to Osaka, Land Of The Murderous Bicycle Huns.

Or so it seems. None of them actually HIT me, but the crazy bikers of Tokyo have nothing on their Southern counterparts. When they’re not trying to kill you, they’re chaining their bikes to anything that will support a bike, regardless of the legality of the place they’re chaining the bike to. This means that the sidewalks get narrower because of all the illegally parked bikes, making the odds of a near miss even higher.

That vaunted Kansai courtesy? It vanishes once heel meets pedal.

I did eventually make it to Den Den Town, Patricia Martin’s Third Holy Place, and it was actually rather disappointing when I actually did find it. It’s got a huge Softmap, sure, and assorted other stores, but, well, I can see why my Osakan buddy likes going to Akihabara.

That’s not to say it’s not got plenty of places to drop your hard-earned yen, because it’s got those, but it doesn’t have the same infectious energy Akihabara does.

In order to have bought something, I picked up a cheap secondhand copy of Da Capo.　Now I can play through it and assure that the main character winds up with Kotori and not that bitch Neru.

Oh, the Softmap guy asked me if I had a point card. I didn’t even try; one success for the day is good enough.

Anyway, maybe it would have been better in midday, or if I’d been able to devote more time to exploration, but I was content to make my purchase and start looking for dinner.

Now, as Nagoya is known for misokatsu, Osaka is known for Okonomiyaki. This worried me; Okonomiyaki is one of those things where they give you a grill and a bunch of raw ingredients and tell you to have at it.

I came really quite close to giving up without even trying and hitting an Italian restaurant before I finally decided, what the hell, McDonalds is RIGHT THERE if I screw up my Okonomiyaki, there’s no shame in failure and plenty of shame in coming all the way to Osaka and eating Italian.

As luck would have it, the Okonomiyaki place I settled on must be the only place in Japan where they cook your Okonomiyaki for you, in front of you.

So I not only didn’t have to embarrass myself, I also got a demonstration for the first time I have to do it myself. It was, like the misokatsu, yummy, and also educational.

Tomorrow: Castles.