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| Osaka and Kyoto sights: Dotonbori district, Kiyomizu Dera temple, and a Takoyaki stand. |
The street signs in Japanese characters met my desperation with indefference. The micro landmarks I was using to guide me on the ground--campaign posters and self-serve drink kiosks--werren't much help either. The same two smiling candidates seemed to hail from every other fence or wall, and the variety of drinks behind the glass began to play tricks on my mind. After 30 minutes, I admitted defeat.
I walked toward the light. It was coming from a large red paper lantern, marking a late-night Takoyaki stand.
I showed a screenshot of the guesthouse's location on a map to the young man tossing balls of rice flour and chucks of octopuses on a hot plate. That, I recognized, was the famous octopus cakes everyone had been telling me to try in Osaka. I got a whiff of the grilled seafood, but the winter gust blew my appetite away.
The Takoyaki stand owner didn't understand English, but could guess my predicament. My luggage with airline tags gave him all the clues he needed to know I was a cluekess traveler. He pulled out his cell phone and tried to call the guesthouse's listed number, but couldn't get through for some teason.
Then he enlisted the help of one of his customers, who was confused by the English markings on my map. The customer began looking up the address on his Google map, set by default to display Japanese. He motioned me to follow another zigzag path.
In the next three hours, I spoke to a 24-hour grocery store clerk out for a smoke break and a couple on bikes chitchatting with each other at a railway crossing. All made every effort to help me find my guesthouse, but they had trouble matching the English addresses to the Japanese streets.
By two in the morning, tired and sleepy, I decided I needed to resume my quest in daylight. I checked into Hotel Agora, a fancy hotel that happened to be nearby. I had a room overlooking the twinkling skyline in the distance. I slept in a rose-scented bed with fresh linen. I has a high-tech commode that looked like a starship captain's bridge. I didn't feel home.
In the next morning, in my stroll around Hotel Agora, I stumbled on the guesthouse, a dwarfish building with a reception area stocked with a small anime library. It was five minutes' walk from Hotel Agora, two turns away from the Takoyaki stand.
I'm keeping my sightseeing agenda light. Sure, it's important to see the Osaka Castle, to wonder the endless stalls in Dotonbori, and to pay homage to the Sumiyoshi shrine. I'll eventually get to them. But I want to settle into the little neighborhood, to feel its pulse, to hear its rhythm.
The section of Moriguchi around Oeda Higashinachi is tightly packed with one- and two-story houses, some with compact trucks and mini-wagons nuzzling up against spaces that barely fit them, like saucer-eyed Pokemon creatures sticking their heads out of Poke balls. Here, in the morning, light footed grandmas with trembling hands come out to greet their neighbors. Around three in the afternoon, school kids in sailor-style frocks and wide-brimmed hats streamed out of a nearby school, like little Japanese versions of Madeline.
Around the corner, Peace Cafe, run by a young Japanese woman, served up home-made Western-style breakfast--triangle-shaped toast pieces cut with Origami-like precision, served over fried eggs. At the end of the road, another coffee shop (with a curiously redundant sign that says, "Coffee Cafe") offers strong black coffee (called "burakku koohi," I discovered), to gentle, waltzing Glockenspiel music that sounds like it's coming from a music box or a carousel.
The guesthouse owner, one of the few in my newly formed small social circle who speak English, wears thick glasses. He supplies me with a fresh kimono every other day. When I needed to adjust my room's temperature, he came to show me how to work the remote control to the heater. ("Sorry the buttons are in Japanese," he apologized.) He gave me the secret code to open the door automatically, because he is, after all, a family man and must keep reasonable hours. That means, if you try to call the guesthouse's number at some ungodly hours, he won't pick up. He's not at the desk 24-7. This is not Hyatt Regency with staff on rotating shifts; this is a family-run inn.
I spend a few hours a day sightseeing, but most of the time, I open my window and listen to the chatter of the kids from the Sango Elementary School a block away. Sitting in a Ramen shop by the Keihan train line, I try to figure out the exact notes played by the doors opening and closing. (It's do-mi-so-do.) At Seven-Eleven, one of the few places where my ATM works, I giggled uncontrollably because the cash machine thanked me with a voice between a chipmunk's and a schoolgirl's. Sometimes I take a nap in the cotton kimono the guesthouse owner gave me. Sometimes I go to the shinto shrine nearby to sit and eat Calbee shrimp chips.
What I'm getting away from is not the place where I live (I love San Francisco very much) nor the people I work with, but the Outlook-dictated daily routines we have somehow come to accept as the new normal, the frantic calls, the emails marked "please respond, urgent!," the back-to-back appointments with barely enough time to get from the first to the next, the breakneck pace we keep to validate our self-importance.
In Osaka, at the mercy of a language I haven't mastered, handicapped by a subway map that looks like a crossword puzzle, I slowed down. And I found stillness--the kind that let me notice the heart-shaped earmuffs on a bicyclist, smell the tea brewing in a kitchen nearby, and hear the raindrops drumming on a roof. I feel the heartbeat of the ordinary folks in Osaka, and it is strong.
It's 6:30 AM here in Moriguchi. The sun is rising lazily over the land. And I feel home.
More in Osaka Diaries: A Salaryman's Wakeup Call
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