Neighbourhood tour - part 1....

Japan is full of stuff that's cute, quirky, or just plain weird, so I thought it might be nice to show you a little of what's near where I live in Nagoya. One of the main places that's fun to wander down is Osu Kannon Arcade- this is basically a covered market full of Japanese cuisine, Engrish covered clothes, and shonky looking toys from China and other dubious Far Eastern origins.

This is it from the outside - I went awandering in the day this time, but at night it's lit up with neon like almost every other building in Japan. If you squint, you can see a Big Issue salesman on the left - I don't know why, but I was surprised to see that here.



This is the inside of Osu Kannon - this is a fairly quite day, so not too many people bustling about. What you can't tell from the picture is the noise of the place - pretty much every stall has people yelling "irrashimasae" to passersby which is "welcome" in Japanese. With that vowel in the last syllable, you can really drag it out, which they do until it almost becomes unintelligible - "irrashimasaaweeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEAaaaeeeeeEEEEE!". Also, you look on the right, you can see a Pikachu suit that's for sale.

Have you ever eaten octopus balls? Stop sniggering at the back - bits of octopus tentacle in batter - takoyaki - are tasty Japanese treat which you can get at this stall.
The guy running it was awesome, singing welcome to people and some other stuff I couldn't understand, probably about how ace his balls were. So I took his photo:

This is what takoyaki looks like btw

Further into the marketplace, there's this rather nice shrine. Or temple - there is a distinction, but I'm buggered if I can remember what it is. The main shriney bit of it is behind, but I wanted to take a photo of this to show you the white bits of paper tied to the washing lines - these are wishes that people have made when they've prayed to the deity that inhabits that shrine. The Japanese are more superstitious than religious, so it's kind of like crossing your fingers or touching wood for us.

I had to quickly include this poor sod, dressed as Japanese here Ultraman. He's advertising a pachinko parlour and had to just stand there waving his forlorn flag back and forth. I was boiling hot that day in shorts and a t-shirt so I don't know how he felt in that fetching body suit.


This is a shop on the outskirts of Osu Cannon and it is geek central - so as you can imagine I felt quite at home there.

It's about 5 floors of comics and various paraphernalia, but it's actually a very frustrating place for me as a foreigner because every bloody thing's in Japanese. Gah - all those lovely comics and I can't read any of them. This shop also follows the general Japanese comic shop rule of making little distinction in the organisation of comic genres - the upshot of which is you can be browsing some fairly tame stuff and suddenly find yourself looking into the pair of bare school girl breasts on the same shelf. Zoinks.

A few floors up in this shop, there's this section:
This is the cosplay section which, if you don't know, is a contraction of costume play. You can hire and buy various outfits here from famous manga and anime series. I haven't seen anyone wearing this on the street so I assume they either only wear them in private, or there's some kind of club you can go to.

Here's another pretty shrine in the middle of the shopping arcade:
If you don't know how these work: inside the main wooden hut is usually some kind of object which is endowed with a kami - a kind of deity or god - which you can pray to to ask for something. You throw in 5 yen as an offering, clap your hands twice (or in this case, pull that bellrope) to "wake" the kami, then put your hands together and pray. Some of the famous shrines have supposedly ancient and powerful items which only the head priests are allowed to see - one of which is Atsuta-Jingu. There's a link to some pictures of that on the right.

While we're on shrines, there's yet ANOTHER in another part of the arcade - the area's not really that big, so three shrines is somewhat excessive in my opinion. And this one is a biggy:

Most of it is off limits unless you're a priest though. There's some nice incense burners outside at the top which some people were congregating around. Although temples and shrines in Japan are sacrosanct, they don't have quite the holy gravitas that churches have in England - people waiting outside were chatting away and smoking cigarettes, there's no impetus to keep your head bowed or worry about being smited (smitten?). It's a pretty nice peaceful atmosphere, even for a heathen foreigner like me.

Finally, I thought it was worth showing this shop off:



it has a rather comical name as you can see. But - interesting fact - did you know that there is a famous chain of outlets in England with the SAME name, but in Japanese? Answer in the next blog entry....