There I was, standing in a chemical factory, minding my own business. Suddenly one of the drums burst into flames: it burned for a few seconds before the heat it was producing (which I could feel from over 30ft away) ignited the surrounding drums. Another few seconds went by, and then the whole room was awash with flame — the fire was lapping up the three other walls. Fine, I just needed to get out of the room while my path was still clear. The sprinklers did their thing (a little bit late, if you ask me) and deposited a fine mist of water over the room. This only had the effect of fanning the flames, and the fire was burning more fiercely than ever.

I stood there, transfixed by the sight of what was going on around me. The renewed vigour of the flames had begun to melt some of the weakest metal structures, and some of the overhead units above the original source of the fire began to fall to the ground. A girder was dislodged and was heading right for me: I ducked, but it was unnecessary as happily another, sturdier, girder blocked its path. Drums which had been resting on shelves were falling all around; the unit above my head dropped down, and as it did so, the metal walkway underneath me gave way and slipped down at an angle. Would this be the end? More on that story later.

Hello and welcome to this travel log entry. I know for a fact that this one is going to be shorter than the last few instalments, not least because I’ve got less to talk about. In Osaka and Kōbe I spent much of my time just pounding the streets, not necessarily doing anything particularly touristy — this was a result of various misfortunes (and mistakes on my part), but also perhaps because at that point I’d lost the keen traveller’s drive to do and see as much as possible. I can assure you that now I’m in Tokyo, it’s returned anew.

Osaka

It was really cold for the first few days when I was in Osaka. I think a cold wind was blowing off the Sea of Japan, and it cut right through you like a knife. Nevertheless, I spent some time wandering around trying to get a feel for Japan’s third-largest city. The impression that I got of the place was of a large, industrial city with not much going on for the tourist. The Rough Guide did suggest as much, so it’s not like I found Osaka a huge disappointment in that regard. I was however quite surprised at how pedestrian-unfriendly it was.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Osaka castle: the guidebook says that, “Critics often throw scorn on Ōsaka-jō, saying the only reason the castle is the single most-visited attraction in Japan – outdoing the country’s best fortress Himeji-jō and even Mount Fuji – is because it’s the only thing to see in the city.” Well, it goes on to admit, that isn’t entirely the case; however, the castle isn’t particularly exciting. Climb to the top, look out over the city, come down through the building with displays entirely in Japanese about the history of the place, and that’s your lot, mate.

Where Osaka shines from a tourist’s point-of-view is in the new developments around the port area. The port is of course one of the biggest (if not the biggest) in Japan, and I saw huge container ships aplenty dotted around the various quays.

I spent an enjoyable couple of hours wandering around the Osaka aquarium, which is suitably located in the port area. Outside the main building was a display of some real penguins (in the photo they almost look like models!), while inside was the usual collection of fish. It was quite like the aquarium we went to in Kuwait, but there was a greater variety of large animals like sea-lions, penguins, and dolphins. Interesting, if a bit creepy, was the extensive display of jellyfish.

Universal Studios Japan

If you remember, I ended the first paragraph of this entry on a bit of a cliff-hanger. You’ll be pleased to hear — or perhaps not — that the whole thing was entirely controlled. It was a demonstration of the kind of special effects used in the film Backdraft at Universal Studios Japan, a theme park which I think is the main reason for the development of the Osaka port area. I hadn’t actually heard of Backdraft before, and I wouldn’t be too sorry if I never got to see it, but nevertheless the special effects demonstration was quite exciting (and when our platform fell through it was thrilling).

This was the first time I’d ever been to one of these theme parks — I don’t come from a family which would troop off to Disneyland every summer — and I didn’t quite know what to expect. I knew that my experience would be coloured by the fact that it was the off-season. I ended up being disgruntled on two counts: first, although the park wasn’t creaking at the seams with people, it wasn’t a people vacuum either — consequently, the queues for rides and other attractions were rather lengthy. Second, I was a little surprised by how few of the staff spoke English. I had expected that, it being such an Americanised venture, the staff would be catering for the foreign market. Not so, it turned out, and I was a little worried when instructions were being barked at me solely in Japanese (”So, we pull this bar down do we? We don’t climb out while we’re moving?”). I suspect that English-speaking staff are probably brought in during the summer months: at this time of year the place is almost solely visited by Japanese. And they all seemed to be loving every minute of it, kitsch though it was.

What I was most impressed by was the attention to detail in the ’streets’ going around the theme park. The place is laid out as if it were a series of exterior film-sets backing onto one another. At one point, I was walking along, and noticed that the road was cracked showing paving underneath. I thought to myself, “That’s a bit messy,” before I realised that people don’t build roads with bitumen covering paving stones these days — the whole thing was part of the set, designed that way. The photo doesn’t really do it justice because it looks quite contrived, but in fact, it seemed very ‘natural’.

In fact walking around was (I suppose) like walking around American cities, or at least like walking around American cities depicted in the flicks. It was all, of course, unbelievably clean, though. In the Jurassic Park area, there were little imprints of fossils in the road surface. They were very subtly done: if you were in a hurry, you wouldn’t notice them. The buildings were also all very smart and realistic (well, again in the sense of movie realism), and most had plaques outside their doors saying what film they’d appeared in. Most were purely exteriors — you couldn’t go inside.

Anyway, for the record, these are the rides I went on and particular attractions I saw:

1. Jurassic Park ride — this was exciting. After queuing for about 45 minutes, I was ushered on to one of those ‘boats’ which is in fact being pulled along on a rack-and-pinion system. We went around various locations looking at highly unbelievable dinosaurs making stupid noises (computer effects don’t work in real life, it turns out) before going down an almost vertical descent at high speed. I’d forgotten that we’d climbed so high, and the shock of the thing caught my breath somewhat!

2. Backdraft exhibition — this wasn’t actually so much of a ‘ride’ as an ‘experience’. There was almost no queue, followed by clips of the film (dubbed into Japanese with no subtitles) and then we were led through three separate sets demonstrating the way fire can be lit and extinguished with ease on set. The first two sets were dull (fire at a distance, sound of sirens coming from behind us), but the third (described above) was really quite exciting.

3. Spider-Man 2 ride — this was a massive let-down. I queued for an hour (exactly) and the ride itself lasted for all of four minutes. Technologically, the ride was impressive (we were given special glasses so it seemed like the various villains were jumping onto our car and wreaking havoc, leading Spidey to save us), but it was something of an anti-climax after the build-up of the queue.

4. E.T., the ride — when I came out of this I could understand why the queue had been non-existent (didn’t stop everyone else from packing on to it, though). Basically, we climbed on to a car (the seats were in the shape of bicycles, geddit?), and were whisked away, upwards, onto E.T.’s home planet. There, there were choruses of E.T.s who were singing bizarre little ditties. The whole thing rather reminded me of the ‘Duff Garden‘ (’Selma’s Choice’) episode of The Simpsons.

Well, I had quite a fun, and particularly tiring day. I think the whole experience would have been entirely different if (a) I’d been there in summer and (b) I’d been there with someone else. The long queues are a definite hindrance to the lone traveller: there’s only so much reading-standing-up a chap can do!

Kōbe

I messed up slightly with regard to the way I organised my time in Kōbe: I arrived on Saturday afternoon, and spent some time wandering through the streets getting a feel for the place, as well as finding the church where I knew there would be Mass in English the following day.

On the Sunday, I went to Mass (modern church — no tabernacle, poor readers with lamentable posture, bizarre serving, ’nuff said here), had some lunch and then spent the rest of my day writing my previous entry on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I then planned to go and see as much as possible on the following day, Monday. That’s where my mistake was: I hadn’t accounted for the fact that most attractions in Japan are closed on Mondays (on account of the fact that they’re open all weekend). The two Mondays I had been in Japan already had been taken up with travel (the first from Takayama to Kyoto; the other from Nagasaki to Hiroshima), and so the closed-on-Mondays thing hadn’t previously bothered me.

That said, I was able to get in to the Port Tower to see some views over Kōbe harbour and the city. My ‘down time’ (it was too cold really to spend more time than necessary wandering through the streets) also meant that I could actually get the previous entry finished — it took a long time to write, in spite of the fact that it’s so dry and probably pretty unreadable! (Sorry about that, everyone).

In case you’re wondering, here are the things that I missed out on visiting in Kōbe:

1. The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Museum — possibly the single event that put Kōbe on the map for outsiders is the fact that this is a city that was ripped apart by a great earthquake in 1995. If I had gone to this museum, I would have seen “Hi-tech multimedia facilities, interactive exhibits and film screenings devoted to the 1995 disaster.” (Rough Guide to Japan)

2. Kōbe City Museum — a museum, detailing the history of the city. “The highlight of the museum […] is its collection of Namban (southern barbarian) art.” (ibid.) Well, I’m not too sorry to have missed that.

3. Kōbe Maritime Museum — this museum, next to the harbour shore, funnily enough, was impressive from the outside because of its roof (can anyone say, “Sydney Opera House”?). Apparently the museum “lacks the impact of its exterior” (ibid.), but all the same, I would have liked to have been able to make that call myself.

4. Shin-Kōbe Ropeway and Nunobiki Herb Park — Well, in retrospect, it would probably have been pretty darn cold in the Herb Park, which is on a hillside above the city. But, if I had gone, I would have seen “a flower garden with a field of lavender and glass houses stocked with more exotic blooms” (ibid.). Plus, I would have been able to go in a cable car, and they’re always fun.

Ise

Ise is a town on the Kii Peninsua, east of Kyoto and Nara: it is a centre of Japanese Shinto Buddhism, being the home of Ise-jingū, the most sacred shrine in the country. In fact, Ise-jingū is so sacred that it’s divided into two sites: the Gekū (the ‘outer shrine’), and the Naikū (the ‘inner shrine’). The Gekū is in the city centre, while the Naikū is in the perimeter of the city, accessible by a short bus-journey.

I went to Ise on a daytrip from Kōbe, which was probably a mistake, for several reasons. First, it required me to go three-and-a-half hours by train in both directions (changing at that pit Nagoya, supplemented on the way back by Osaka). My time might more profitably have been spent going to the places I’d missed out on in Kōbe the day before (see above). Furthermore, when I got there, it was something of a letdown.

I arrived at the JR station, where there is no tourist office. The main tourist office is opposite the Gekū. Seeing that I wanted to ask at a tourist office how to get to the Gekū, I was in something of a quandary. (Is quandary the right word here? I certainly wasn’t in a dilemma, and I wouldn’t say that I was somewhere between a rock and a hard place, or indeed between the devil and the deep-blue sea. But I digress.)

I took my chance and started walking, looking at the (feeble) map in the guidebook, pretending that I was going in the right direction. Well, my hypothesis wasn’t in any way correct and I wandered around for about three-quarters of an hour. Admittedly, I did find a post office where I was able to withdraw cash, so that time wasn’t completely wasted. Eventually, I walked back to the railway station, my point of origin, and started going in the other direction. I found a bus seemingly going to the Gekū, so I got on.

As it happened, I could have walked (that bus journey was over in all of 3 minutes) but I say again, I didn’t know the way. I got a map from the tourist office, now perfectly evident, and went in to the shrine.

It’s perfectly nice to wander around, with tall green trees lining wide paths laid with wood-chippings. However, there really isn’t very much to do or see. All of the wooden buildings get rebuilt every twenty years to keep them in ship-shape condition, so while this shrine was opened in the fifth Century, there’s nothing externally visible which dates from then. There are funny guards who are dressed to look like doormen at Harrod’s or some such place: they see to it that you don’t take photos of what’s actually going on in the shrines (if you’re wondering, not much).

It was a similar story at the Naikū. Even wider paths there, lined with even taller trees make for a perfectly pleasant walking experience, but not necessarily one that necessitates a seven-hour round trip. I’m sorry, but I preferred Nara, where there was a greater amount and a wider variety to see.

Next entry will be on Tokyo (at last!). I’m not quite sure when I’ll write it, or what I’ll write, but you’ll know soon enough. By the way, if you’re checking this site regularly looking for updates, you can use RSS — the RSS feed for the Travel section is at http://www.richardflynn.net/travel/feed. You have no idea what I’m talking about? The BBC has an explanation which goes some way to explain what RSS is and how it can be a massive help for your online life. I have to say that I’ve found RSS a great aid, since you don’t have manually to check multiple websites to see if they’ve been updated — a programme on your computer can do it for you. (Unfortunately, my photos haven’t got an RSS feed — yet — that’s planned for a future update. However, for now, you’ll have to check the Photos section yourself.)