ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING TOKYO IS NOT

By David Pilling

Friday, February 01, 2008


One
of the first things to know about Osaka is that people stand on the right of escalators and stride up on the left. This distinguishes the rough-and-ready western city from Tokyo, the eastern capital, where people do precisely the reverse. In Japan, where conventions carry the weight of law, it is an act of rebellion, even a declaration of independence. Whenever I pull into Shin-Osaka station, two hours and thirty-six high-speed minutes from Tokyo, I never fail to picture an escalator, somewhere on the border of eastern and western Japan, where the rules are in dispute and mayhem has broken out.

Osaka, by day Japan's second-biggest city, is everything Tokyo is not. I love Tokyo. But I love Osaka precisely because it is not Tokyo – and decidedly so. It is brash and unkempt where Tokyo is refined and prissy. Its cuisine is hot, spicy and fried, not raw, delicate and thigh-thinningly-healthy. Its people are charming and pushy and always ready with a scowl or the brashest of smiles. In Tokyo, you can be bludgeoned to death by politeness

Even Osaka's dialect is distinct. Osaka-ben, as it is known, has a rough hew beloved of comedians and off-colour storytellers.

In several aspects, Osaka outdoes Tokyo. One is in the pure, majestic ugliness of its cityscape. The city is a melting pot of concrete and a swirl of overhead flyovers that loop improbably, like fat udon noodles, past high-rises and giant billboards, some nearly as tall as the buildings on whose rooftops they are erected. Osakans prepared to acknowledge that Tokyo has any merits at all, often speak admiringly of the “green city”, roughly akin to someone in Death Valley envying the precipitation of the Gobi Desert.

Parts of Osaka are arranged as if someone had taken a normal city and squished it together. In one street there is a giant, garishly painted Ferris wheel, wedged improbably between tall buildings as though the London Eye were somehow to have been set spinning on the side of the Lloyd's Building. A well-known display above a restaurant features a 20ft mechanical crab. Osaka is big, brash and rarely subtle.

Tokyo is a hidden city. Its restaurants, clubs, lounges, bars, live-houses, theatres and other diverse places of amusement are secret, tucked away behind uninviting doors. In Osaka, everything is in the open, like Tokyo with its guts spilt out on the pavement.

Osaka has been working on its character for a while. It was already an important city in the 7th century, and the centre of Japanese commerce for hundreds of years when nearby Nara and Kyoto were the capital. Today, it is the centre of Kinki, a region whose output outstrips that of both Canada and India.

Goods historically passed through Osaka before being redistributed to the rest of Japan, a medieval hub-and-spoke system that provided the merchant city with abundant tax revenue. Always innovative, the city invented futures trading, conducted in the Dojima Rice Market from 1730, long before derivatives and the rebundling of dud mortgages became fashionable. According to Osaka's Entrepreneurial Museum, Osaka invented suburbs, khaki, cinemas, electric washing machines, insurance and, most important, pot noodles.

On a recent visit to Osaka, I stood in the famous Dotonbori street, a little way down from the Shochiku-za kabuki theatre. From the country that brought you the silence of Zen, Dotonbori is a living monument to cacophony. Several layers of sounds competed for available airwaves: the high-pitched warble of the latest J-Pop anthems; a distorted entreaty, relayed by megaphone, to partake of an unmissable discount on panty-hose; competing storefront jingles advertising cakes, CDs, and takoyaki fried octopus balls; and, wafting from Shochiku-za, the accelerating clatter of wooden blocks that is the trademark sound of kabuki.

Many people were gathering near Glico Man, a building-high neon figure of an athlete that has been the symbol of Glico candy since the 1920s and is now an Osaka landmark. The nearby Ebisubashi bridge was under reconstruction following a recent drowning when several thousand people jumped into the canal's black waters to celebrate a victory by the Hanshin Tigers, Osaka's beloved baseball team.

That victory notwithstanding, the Tigers have suffered the so-called “Curse of the Colonel” since 1985 when rapturous fans flung a statue from a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet into the canal's depths. It is a tribute to their murkiness that, despite frequent dredging, the Colonel has never been found.

Before I took the train back to Tokyo, I stopped at a ramen shop, an open-air stand with a few tiny tables set on raised tatami mats. I bought a ticket for pork ramen from a vending machine for 650 yen and handed it to one of the assistants who ladled thick stock into a plastic bowl. After helping myself to drinking water and kimchi pickled cabbage – Osaka has a strong Korean influence – I removed my shoes and kneeled on the tatami by one of the low tables to eat. Presently, someone from a neighbouring table offered me a can of beer, an act of spontaneous generosity with which Osaka spills over.

But my truly Osakan moment came shortly after when a little mouse appeared and began to scurry up and down the gully between the tatami platform and the kitchen counter. I have never seen a mouse in a Tokyo restaurant and can only imagine the panic that such a rodent visitation would set off.

Here, people looked on quizzically as they might at a cute dog. Then they proceeded with the important business of eating. Since my ramen broth was brimming with flavour, I did the same. When I left, I checked my shoes, just in case, but the mouse had gone.

David Pilling is the FT's Tokyo bureau chief