Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi

Posted on May 4, 2025 by admin

The sign doesn’t say the winter accessories are ¥300, but rather that they start at ¥300. A critical detail, but even so the items aren’t pricey.

We’d come across a curious shop deep in the heart of Osaka.

Riding into Osaka on a Keihan regional line, we transferred to the city’s subway system, specifically the Midosuji line (御堂筋線, Midōsuji-sen), which runs under a grand avenue of that name, Midosuji Blvd., for a few miles. The Midosuji line proceeds from Umeda to Namba and beyond to places like Tennoji, names that might not mean much to the outside world, but which are old and familiar to me.

My first summer in Japan, I hung out briefly with Bernadette and Lyn, two Kiwis, and Sean, a Californian.

“I tell people at home I can speak Japanese,” Sean said one fine evening at Osaka Castle Park. He’d only been in the country a few weeks.

“Oh, yeah?” said the saucy Lyn.

“Yeah, Yodoyabashi. Hommachi. Daikokucho!”

That was a laugh. He’d rattled off some of the station names on the Midosuji line.

I digress. Yuriko and I went a few stations south, then emerged at ground level and headed east on foot, along another major avenue, though without the ginko trees or skyscrapers or wide bridges of Midosuji Blvd. I had to look up the new street’s name later: Chou-Dori, a literal translation of which would be, Middle Road.

Above Chou-Dori is a major expressway. Built under the expressway is a row of massive buildings, one after another, maybe 10 or more of them: Semba Center, the entire collection is called. Space is at a premium in urban Japan.

Each Semba Center building had entrances on either end, directly in the shadow of the expressway, and each building – at least the half-dozen or so we walked through – was packed with discount retailers, lining each side of a hall that ran the entire length of the building. You want discounters in Osaka, this is the place to come, Yuriko told me. Clothes, mostly, including more than one cloth merchant, but also household goods and decorative items.

At Semba Center Building No. 9, 3-3-110 Senbacho, Chuo-ku, Osaka (to give its full address) is Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi.

That is, the Railroad Forgotten Items Store. It’s a store that sells items left on JR trains – presumably Osaka-area JR trains, since I know there is an equivalent store in Tokyo. Many millions of people use those trains every day, so it stands to reason that there is a constant flow of many left items, all the time.

JR must have a deal with the store owner, the details of which hardly matter, though I suppose the railroad acts as a wholesaler of items left over a few months (some details are here). I’ll bet really valuable items aren’t sold that way, though. If somehow your Brasher Doubloon ended up in the JR lost and found, it would mean you were grossly careless, someone who found it had no idea what it was, and a JR-favored coin dealer would get to buy it.

Be that as it may, people leave behind a lot of umbrellas. In Osaka, there’s no excuse to pay full price for an umbrella.

The place is well stocked with clothes, too.

Many are the small items. Seems only reasonable.

People lose some odd things.

There’s enough readable text for me probably to figure out what this is, but somehow not knowing is more satisfying as a travel memory.

Prague Castle: St Vitus Cathedral

Posted on May 1, 2025 by admin

When thinking about my recent visit to Prague with my brother, certain questions come to mind. Such as, what is St. Vitus Dance? Who was St. Vitus?

As for the latter question, he is one of those legendary saints, emerging from the bloody mists of early Christian persecution. “According to the legend… St. Vitus suffered martyrdom at a very early age under the emperor Diocletian,” the trusty 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica notes.

“Son of a Sicilian nobleman who was a worshipper of idols, Vitus was converted to the Christian faith without the knowledge of his father, was denounced by him and scourged, but resisted all attacks on his profession… Among the diseases against which St Vitus is invoked is chorea, also known as St. Vitus’s Dance.”

Chorea refers to abnormal involuntary movement disorders of a few types, but not epilepsy. A more detailed entry about St. Vitus is in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, which says: “St. Vitus is appealed to, above all, against epilepsy, which is called St. Vitus’s Dance, and he is one of the Fourteen Martyrs who give aid in times of trouble.”

The text seems to conflate chorea with epilepsy, but you don’t go to books of that vintage for current medical knowledge. Regardless, St. Vitus has a long history of veneration, including in Bohemia. That would account for the naming of St. Vitus Cathedral, which we visited in Prague, coming in early afternoon by way of a streetcar and then a less-visited entrance to Prague Castle.

An impressive hulk of a church on a high hill, St. Vitus Cathedral is a major presence in Prague Castle.

When we were here in 1994, the church was dedicated to Vitus alone, but these days it is the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saints Vitus, Wenceslaus and Adalbert (metropolitní katedrála svatého Víta, Václava a Vojtěcha). The renaming happened a few years later. The thinking might have been that it was all well and good to honor a popular Sicilian saint, but it would also be good to add some hometown martyrs.

Inside the church was, to rephrase for our time (in its original form, a favorite expression of my mother’s), cold as the mammaries of a Wicca practitioner. Colder in fact than outside on that day in mid-March, but I’ll take that as a blow for authenticity. For most of the cathedral’s long history, including centuries when it wasn’t finished, its HVAC was the Lord.

The chill might have discouraged sitting around on pews, but not from taking a circuit up a side aisle, around behind the altar, and back down the other side aisle.

What is it about the Gothic ceilings? A vast volume of space, or at least the perception of a vast volume of space, but it’s more than that.

A small sample of the rich detail.

Call this one mother and child and prelate.

Last but hardly least, a gargoyle from outside now on display in the church.

Retired from the madcap life up there on the roof with the other gargoyles. Or maybe their activities up there aren’t the stuff of comedy. The Gargoyles of St. Vitus sounds like a Victorian horror story. Better yet, The Dancing Gargoyles of St. Vitus. Could be an episode of Night Gallery or, with updated tech, Black Mirror.

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Posted on April 30, 2025 by admin

I’m not sure exactly what “Hey, this is a World Heritage Site! Show some respect, wanker!” would be in German, but I suspect in German you probably could shout just the right mix of threat and shaming.

Spotted in March on Museum Island (Museumsinsel) in Berlin.

Note that the red-letter headline is in English. I think of that as more of a function of English as a ramshackle world language than the propensity of Americans, Britons or Australians to use bullhorns while peeing on World Heritage Sites from their bicycles or scooters. Well, maybe Australians would. (I trade in that stereotype with abiding affection for that nation, since the Australians I know would sound right back about Americans). To be honest, it also sounds like something Florida Man would do.

We were in the vicinity of the Alte Nationalgalerie.

Make it a Greco-Roman temple, at least on the outside, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV must have said, though he didn’t live to see its completion in 1876. August Stüler was tasked with the design, but he didn’t live to see it done either.

The museum complex on Museum Island certainly deserves to be on the UNESCO list. A detail from the museum’s tourist leaflet shows the Old National Gallery in relation to the others, and the fact that the Pergamon Museum is “closed for refurbishment.” Dang.

We didn’t go directly to his gallery up on the third floor, but I knew the Casper David Friedrich was a priority at Alte Nationalgalerie. Like visiting an old friend. They say maintaining social relations is important for one’s health in older years, and maybe that’s so. But I’m sure visiting old friends makes your life better in the here and now. Mine, anyway. Including mainly people, but also places and favorites in art or entertainment.

My old buddy Casper’s canvasses are usually good for more than one detail. Such as “Abtei im Eichwald” (1809/10), sporting a good old Casper David Friedrich moon.

Or “Eichbaum im Schnee” (1829). The man had a gift for trees too.

This one is CDF and it isn’t, since it is a copy of one of his paintings, “Klosterrunie im Schnee” (1891), by an unknown artist. The original didn’t survive WWII.

There was even an appearance of CDF himself, at work, in a portrait by colleague Georg Friedrich Kersting (d. 1847).

There probably would have been more CDF on display, but as it happens, the place to be right now to see many of his works is the Met, which is hosting Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature until May 11. Seventy-five paintings, drawings, and prints by Friedrich are in that show.

No matter, the museum offers plenty else to see, with a collection of European art roughly from the French Revolution to WWI. The place wasn’t crowded, but a fair number of museumgoers were around.

We spent a while looking around ourselves.

Detail from “Die Pontinischen Sümpfe bei Sonnenuntergang” (“The Pontine Marshes at Sunset”) (1848) by August Kopisch, which has a Chesley Bonestell vibe.

Detail from “Doppleporträt der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm” (1855) by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann.

Detail from “Tükische Straßenszene“ (1888) by Osman Hamdi Bey.

Detail from “Porträt Kaiser Wilhelm II” (1895) by Vilma Parlaghy.

Tough luck, Willie. But at least your hope didn’t end at the end of a rope.

Palm Jumeirah

Posted on April 29, 2025 by admin

When I went to the observation deck of Burj Khalifa in Dubai, I expected to see the Palm Jumeirah artificial islands off in the distance. I did, but barely. Its distinctive, palm-like shape was hazy and mostly indistinct off in the distance. So I decided a few days later to get a better look, though not quite like the images seen from space, such as one from the International Space Station.

For a view closer to the surface of the Earth, but not too close, you go to the observation deck of the Palm Tower, which rises nearly 790 feet above the Nakheel Mall at a mid-point on the stem of the Palm Jumeriah. “The View at the Palm,” the place is called in English. I took in the view on March 2.

Access to the elevators, beyond the ticket desk, includes a room with photos and brief text about the building of the Palm Jumeirah. The briefest version: a lot of rocks and sand were dumped into the Persian Gulf – which the UAE calls the Arabian Gulf – and artfully engineered to create dry land, at least for our generation. I’m sticking with the Persian Gulf; there is already an Arabian Sea, which is bigger anyway, but maybe they’re both envious of India, which gets an entire ocean.

At one point on the tower’s lower floor, you pass through a colorful tunnel featuring a painting of colorful undersea life. Maybe it evokes the bottom of the Persian Gulf near Dubai? In a sort of colorful cartoon way?

The elevator whisks you up to a busy observation deck.

Busy for a reason, namely the fine 360-degree view. Once I could work my way through the other vista-takers, I started with the view out to the end of the Palm.

There at the end is Atlantis Dubai. Actually, the structure with the Arabic dome outline is only part of the Atlantis Dubai resort: Atlantis The Palm.

A little further down the shore is Atlantis: The Royal, “the most ultra-luxury experiential resort in the world,” asserts the web site copy. No doubt it is ultra, but just looking at the design, I couldn’t help thinking of some of the rectangular cuboid building blocks I played with as a small child, stacking them something like that.

I checked, and in theory one can get a rack-rate room at Atlantis: The Palm on some days for around $330 a night, but of course such a number is merely a starting point of a price escalation. As for The Royal, the rate is some hundreds more, thence to the stratosphere.

Views of the palm fronds.

Impressive rows of real estate, especially considering that it was created ex nihilo only in this century. So it isn’t quite true that they aren’t making more real estate. But I guess it is true that no one is making cheap real estate, since I doubt that would be economically feasible, even for oil states.

Ever the curious sort, I checked some of the hotel rates at the properties closer to the Palm Tower, and they are in the same league, roughly, as upper midscale or upscale properties in the United States (my hotel near the airport counted as midscale, I think).

Of course, only some of these views include hotels. There are plenty of apartments and condos too, and I’m sure their price points are mostly elevated as well.

The 360-degree panorama includes a look back at mainland Dubai.

You’d think this would be downtown, but no.

Dubai has a number of building clusters sizable enough to be called downtown elsewhere. But in Dubai, they are just more Dubai. Off in the distance is an equally large cluster that includes (in the midground) the sail-like Burj Al-Arab and (somewhere in the background) the Burj Khalifa.

The creation of Palm Jumeirah also meant the creation of beaches, and from my tourist perch at The View, I could see a large group of moving dots – they must have been children, considering their movements – down below.

I expect it was some kind of resort babysitting (ahem, curated activity), allowing the dots to scamper around while their parents and older relatives drank under large umbrellas. I couldn’t help thinking of Harry Lime’s evil ruminations in The Third Man.

Good thing I’m not, and most people are not, the murdering sort, for fun or profit.

Jama Masjid, Delhi

Posted on April 28, 2025 by admin

Part of the inspiration to visit India was the book City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) by the admirable Scottish writer William Dalrymple, which I’ve known about for years but only got around to reading late last year. Timing is important in one’s travels, even before going anywhere, and I happened to be reading that book as we discussed going to Japan in the coming winter. In a typical train of thought for me, I figured if we’re already in Japan, how much more effort would it take to go on to India? Some, as it turned out, mostly after we arrived, but worth the effort.

One memorable passage in City of Djinns involved Dalrymple’s visit to Jama Masjid in Delhi, during the end of Ramadan one year. A mass swirl of humanity came to the mosque on that occasion.

When we were there in February on an ordinary non-Friday, humanity was mostly represented by tourists, contributing our little bit to the upkeep — a reasonable $3.50 or so each at that moment in February. Plus another $1 or so baksheesh each to the young man watching your shoes.

As well we should visit. Extraordinary in its grandness, the place also reminds a North American just how far he is from home.

At the entrance of the prayer hall.

That hints at a history of video crews making, or trying to make, their works on the sly. Equipment doesn’t need to as large as it used to be.

Up.

Once again, what would modern India be without reminders of Mughal power and prestige? The mosque is the work of Shah Jahan I (d. 1666), fifth Mughal emperor, or rather the 5,000 workers hired for the job and supervised by his Grand Vizier. “Indians, Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Europeans” were among the workers, according to Wiki.

The mosque commands a hill in Old Delhi, rising on the edge of the marketplace maze that is Chandni Chowk. Its minarets rise 135 feet.

I didn’t have the urge to make a video at the Jama Masjid of Delhi, but I can see its omnidirectional visual appeal. The Mughal talent for architectural grandness shows up in pretty much every direction.

Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, Kamakura

Posted on April 27, 2025 by admin

In my experience, most visits to Japanese cities start by getting off a train. Most, but not all. In Kamakura, it did.

Torii (鳥居) gates also mark a beginning. Gate gates, in other words, though a torii is a special kind of gate, either marking an entrance to a Shinto shrine or the road to a shrine. (Most of the time.) Not far from the Kamakura main train station is one such gate.

Past it is Komachi-dori, which leads almost directly to Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine. It’s a pedestrian shopping street, which are fairly common in Japan. Less common is that it has a name, since many streets in that country do not. Addresses are determined by increasingly small subdivisions of the land, a system that takes some getting used to, but which seems to work for the Japanese.

Komachi-dori is packed with shops, cafes and restaurants.

Standard souvenirs are widely available. Standard for Japan, that is.

Other places are more unusual, even for Japan. At one shop, you can have a belt custom made.

Who knows, artisanal belts might be the rage now. ¥6000 as of today is a bit less than $42, and in February would have been a little less than $40, and maybe worth it, considering the low quality of mass-produced belts that sell for half that much or so. But we didn’t stop in.

We also took a pass on Kamakura Pig Park.

A place where you can have coffee or tea, and play with “micro pigs,” it seems. I understand there is a trend toward cute animal cafes, often cats. We saw one of those on the street as well.

Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine is a large Shinto complex, founded in the 11th century of the Common Era and getting a boost during the Kamakura shogunate not long after. The grounds include some handsome structures, smaller and larger.

The structures aren’t 1,000 years old, owing to the usual cycle of destruction and reconstruction common to wooden buildings. The Meiji government ordered some of the destruction in the 19th century, when it decided that Buddhism and Shinto had to be separate things. Previously rampant syncretism between the two in Japan had been the order of the day, but apparently that would never do, and so a fair number of sacred sites were thus destroyed, including structures at Tsurugaoka Hachimangu.

The stairs to the main sanctuary.

The “semi-mythical” Emperor Ojin, according to a sign in Japanese and English, is enshrined there as a kami. As far as I can tell, there isn’t agreement on whether such a human ruler of that name actually existed back in the first millennium CE, but I expect a niggling little detail like that wouldn’t bother a kami.

Prayers.

Speaking of torii, these mark the path to a sub-shrine, Maruyama Inari.

Small, but that is presumably all the god of rice, agriculture and prosperity Inari needs, to do whatever it is kami do.

Orloj (The Prague Astronomical Clock)

Posted on April 24, 2025 by admin

They say petty con men hang out at Old Town Square in Prague, looking for marks for the likes of three-card monte or a shell game or bogus currency exchange schemes, which raises the question: who hasn’t heard of those cons? But I have to report that no one approached us at Old Town Square for trickery or anything else. Sometimes it’s good to be old men who are essentially invisible.

We had the idea at Old Town Square that we’d see the Church of the Mother of God before Týn, which has a cool church name. Distinctive, anyway, incorporating a very local place name. Týn Courtyard, next to the church, is a small area that hosted visiting merchants at one time, and whose largess helped build the edifice. There has been a church on the site for at least 900 years, with the usual story of modifications, rebuilding, replacement, fires, style changes and of course some sectarian strife now and then.

The church is a little off the square, but not far. In my image, it is behind the monumental memorial to Jan Hus and other Hussites, which dates only from 1915. The church wasn’t open when we dropped by. Too bad, I understand Tycho Brahe is buried near the altar; that would have been worth seeing all by itself.

Across the square is Old Town Hall, dating from the 13th century.

On the opposite side from my image, Old Town Hall is the site of the Orloj – the astronomical clock that doesn’t concern itself with whether most people can read it. The master clockmaker and the few learned men who could read it when it was new probably didn’t concern themselves with that fact either. Why would they?

The crowds don’t go to read it anyway, but to watch the mechanical figures move on the hour. We arrived just as that was happening early on the afternoon of March 12.

“Starting in the 13th century, astronomical clocks began springing up around Europe, using intricate functions to show information such as lunar phases, the position of the sun and moon, and the zodiac at any given moment,” My Modern Met explains.

Work on the Prague clock started a little later than that, in 1410. Again as usual with something that old, modifications and additions and changes and restorations have been made over the years, including as recently as 2018.

“The figurines, which were added in the 1600s, represent four vices [sic, death is a vice?]. Vanity is shown as a man admiring himself in a mirror, a miser holding a bag of gold represents greed, while another strumming an instrument is to show lust or ‘earthly greed.‘ The fourth sculpture, a skeleton, represents death and rings the bell each hour as the other figurines shake their heads.”

After the 1 p.m. movement of the figurines, the crowd thinned out.

If I understand correctly (no promises), the time-keeping aspects of the clock includes three different systems: a conventional 24-hour clock, a 24-clock that whose zero hour is at sunset – both new and competing systems when the clock was built – and an older system of unequal hours, whose length depended on the time of the year, something like the Romans used (12 hours by day, four watches at night), though it is thought to date back to Babylon.

“But the clock is about much more than telling time,” My Modern Met continues. “Two separate wands representing the sun and the moon move around the zodiac ring. The sun moves counterclockwise against the ring, and gives an indication of where the sun and moon are in their orbit around the Earth.

“The moon wand is half white and half black in order to show the current cycle of the moon. Interestingly, the rotation of the ball showing the lunar phases is entirely owed to gravity, something unique in this genre of timekeeping.

“A small golden star shows the position of the vernal equinox and sidereal time based on the Roman numerals.”

Most of that wasn’t anything I could understand just looking up at the clock, and I’m not entirely sure I can piece it together in the comfort of my home office. Still, the intricacies and metalwork are marvels to behold — representing a remarkable store of pre-modern knowledge and mechanical aptitude — and behold them we did.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Posted on April 23, 2025 by admin

In case you don’t know where you are, at a certain spot in central Berlin, a large sign will tell you.

Bet it’s a nice glow at night, too. The sign is just outside the Alexanderplatz Bahnhof, where intercity trains and the U-bahn and the S-bahn and trams and buses converge. The station was an important one for us, since we often transferred there to the U-bahn line to the equally interesting Rosenthaler Platz, location of our accommodations (and which for some reason is two words). Going to or from our hotel generally involved passing through Alexanderplatz.

The platz has a long history as a meeting place, and along the way (1805, to be exact) picked up its current name, in honor of Tsar Alexander I, who visited Prussia that year. But if you had to pick a time to visit, probably 100 years ago would be it. One of the reasons they say Berlin in the ’20s was Berlin in the ’20s was the activity around Alexanderplatz.

In 1969, the East German authorities built the World Clock (Weltzeituhr) at Alexanderplatz, whose function is to tell the time of 148 large cities around the world, and display a spiffy model of the Solar System (and I count nine planets; glad no busybody has removed Pluto).

Built to remind passersby (at one time) that socialism was the future? Was worldwide? That the Solar System is red? Pining down motive among communist officialdom over 50 years ago is a fool’s errand, I’m afraid.

As seen at about 4:10 pm on March 13. We sat on a bench nearby, taking the rest we needed as older men. But I should have taken a closer look at the clock, since it seems that the drum tells us that the time in Berlin – along with Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest, Madrid, Paris, Prague and a lot of other places – is just past 8 am. So the mechanism had stopped? Did I misunderstand it? Something else?

Such are the little retroactive mysteries of travel. In any case, life was going on at the platz, all around the clock: shoppers, commuters, buskers and more. At various points in history, Alexanderplatz has been the scene of mass political demonstrations (e.g. 1848, 1919, 1989), but even on ordinary days, people are out trying to make a point. Such as this fellow.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in Germany, but my impression is that waving, or even displaying, the national flag isn’t quite as common as here in the U.S. Turned out, however, that his flag was a bit modified to convey a message that one hopes isn’t nationalist.

The platz reminded me that I ought to read Berlin Alexanderplatz. I remember some years ago watching the first episode of the ’80s West German TV adaptation, but not liking it, except now I can’t remember why. Maybe Fassbinder isn’t for me, though I haven’t seen any of his other movies either. Still, I suppose if you want to know more about Berlin in the ’20s – and not the 2020s – the book would be a worthwhile read.

The Jantar Mantar of Jaipur

Posted on April 22, 2025 by admin

Apparently Sawai Jai Singh II (d. 1743), Raja of Amber and founder and Raja of Jaipur, had a keen interest in astronomy, because he commissioned the construction of six naked-eye observatories — jantar mantars – in his realm in the early 18th century. The one in Jaipur itself is a complex of structures hard to understand without explanation. Or even with explanation a lot of the time.

I didn’t take that picture, since that vantage was unavailable, or at least I didn’t know about it. Someone calling himself Knowledge Seeker thoughtfully released the image into the public domain, however. It gives a sense of the layout of instruments in a sort of plaza, though it doesn’t depict the large sundial, except right at the lower left corner. Just behind the Jantar Mantar is City Palace, more about which eventually, but which Jai Singh II also had built. One of those busy kings, sounds like.

“The Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur constitutes the most significant and best preserved set of fixed monumental instruments built in India in the first half of the 18th century; some of them are the largest ever built in their categories,” UNESCO says, for indeed it is a World Heritage Site, which are thick on the ground in India. “Designed for the observation of astronomical positions with the naked eye, they embody several architectural and instrumental innovations.”

This is the kind of place that reminds me once again how little I know. Such as about Indian astronomy, thousands of years in the making. A familiarity with that subject might help answer the question I have – why didn’t Jai Singh II incorporate places for telescopes? I feel certain he would have had some, imported or locally made.

The Jantar Mantar is also good for some gee-whiz moments, such as looking up at the world’s largest sundial.

Our affable guide in Jaipar that day, Ali, points to the time on the enormous dial plate. The instrument is capable of measuring time to an accuracy of two seconds (with some caveats; see “How accurate is it?” on this page).

He asserted that the sundial is indeed the world’s largest, though I’ve seen other sources that weasel with such phrasing as “one of.” I’ll go with Ali on this one: the largest in the world, unless I find out about a bigger one, and I’m not going to look very hard.

Ali also told us that his father was a tour guide in Jaipur, as was his father before him, which is some span, since he might have been close to my age. He was knowledgeable enough that being in the family biz seemed likely. He also might have had information about the use of telescopes back then, but I forgot to ask.

Other instruments, whose descriptions I read on English signs next to the Hindi, but which are less easy to understand than a sundial, except to say they are useful for tracking objects in the sky.

More structures, either built upward or downward.

Of course each instrument has a purpose and a name – such as Samrat Yantra, Jaya Prakasa, and Rama Yantra, which supposedly Jai Singh II designed himself. Detailed information is at jantarmantar.org. Even without a tight grip on all the details, there’s no doubt that the Jantar Mantar of Jaipur is impressive, besides having an impressive name that rolls right off your tongue.

Dotonburi & Hozenji Temple, Osaka

Posted on April 21, 2025 by admin

There he is, Glico Man.

A lot of people want to emulate Glico Man.

Or at least acknowledge him.

Gilco Man may be a mascot for the Japanese food conglomerate of that name – the Osaka food conglomerate, maker of Pocky sticks – but he’s pretty much a one-trick pony on the sign at least, exuberant at his racing victory. Still, everyone in Osaka knows him, since the sign in one form or another — LED these days, neon before — has been displayed for 90 years over Ebisu Bridge (Ebisubashi) where it crosses the Dotonbori Canal.

Dotonburi is the name of the canal, which is an early Edo period (17th century) enlargement of a river, but it is also the name of the district. A packed place even by Japanese standards, replete with restaurants, bars and other small business, many of whom advertise themselves in highly visual ways. When photographers, pro and casual, want to take flashy nighttime images of Osaka, with walls of neon and LED advertising and crowds filling the pedestrian avenues, Dotonburi is where they go.

We were there during the day, joining the crowds, both on the bridge and on Dotonburi’s side streets.

Nice view from the bridge.

Something I wouldn’t have expected in February, but we did see something similar in December.

When enthusiastic fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team really want to celebrate, they jump into the canal. Forty years ago during an especially exuberant moment, they found a life-sized advertising statue of Col. Sanders at a nearby KFC and dropped that into the canal, where it was unrecovered until 2009. The Tigers were pretty much a doormat team during the period when the Colonel was lost – mere coincidence?

A sort of Ferris wheel, looking out over the canal. It wasn’t there in the 1990s. We considered a ride, but it looked like it was moving awfully slow.

One of my favorite features of Dotonburi is the 3D restaurant advertising.

Hidden away in the nearby streets mostly too small for vehicles but well adorned with odd things —

— is Hozenji Temple.

“Built in 1637, Hozenji Temple pays homage to Fudo Myoo, one of five guardians of Buddhism,” notes Travel Japan. “During the 1600s, Namba and the surrounding area of Dotonbori were blossoming as a center for entertainment, with dramatic performances of kabuki and bunraku taking place throughout the district. Even the temple catered to the performing arts, with traditional rakugo storytelling and stage plays performed on site.”

One depiction of the Buddha.

But the temple is better known for its statue of Fudo Myoo.

Covered with moss, he is.

Because the thing to do is toss water on the statue. Keeps him hydrated. I took a turn myself, because who I am to deny Fudo Myoo a nice cup of water?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling