It was time to leave Sendai for the city of Osaka. I mean, Sendai is a city, but as soon as we got into Osaka, this felt like the most CITY of cities.
The area around the central station is just insane. I’ve said it before, but in the UK a major train station is a collection of diesel-y pasties at Greggs and a depressed Pret A Manger—if you’re lucky. Here, the central stations are huge, vibrant, multi-floored shopping malls across multiple buildings, with hundreds of shops and restaurants all crammed in together. There are escalators and lifts and staircases going off in all directions, with raised walkways connecting every building so you don’t even need to come near traffic. Often you don’t know if you’re inside, outside, in the basement, or on the 4th floor. And if I’ve not yet mentioned it enough, everything is spotlessly clean. I mean REALLY clean; not a single paper receipt blowing around in a forgotten corner, or a fag butt caught in the crack of a paving slab. It’s like an AI-generated view into the idyllic future of cities. Like one of those washy futurist sketches in an architectural student’s notebook has come to life.
And then, to add song to the city soundscape, there are multiple…. buskers?—doesn’t quite do them justice—aspiring pop stars is more apt. They aren’t the smelly, long-haired, multi-coloured guitar strummers on the urine-soaked floors of the London Underground. These are young, sexy, stylish singers, with proper microphones, an amp, and ambitious attitude, belting out heart-warming anthems I can only assume are about tenderness and love. Honestly, there were swarms of prettily dressed girls around boy bands like seagulls waiting for a shift change at the fish trawlers’ docks. They knew the words, sang along, and waved their arms, screaming when their favourite skinny teenager sang his next line and looked at them. In the UK, if you saw a group of lads outside a train station, you’d get a torrent of verbal abuse or, if you’re lucky, they would stay quiet and just stab you.
We arrived in this marvellous city having flown from Sendai. The bullet train on this occasion was double the price because we would have had to change in Tokyo. Seen from the plane, Osaka is absolutely huge, with a collection of skyscrapers all clamouring for the top spot. One of these is the Umeda Sky Building, where you can find the Kuchu Teien Observatory—and “observatory” in this context means “observation deck” if you want to Google it.
First, you go to the 3rd floor to queue for the glass elevator to the 35th floor. Then you ride the sky escalator, through hanging space, up into a hole in the roof to the 39th floor to get to the ticket office. You can get here for free, and it’s a pretty good view, but for £10 you can go higher, right up onto the roof of the building for a full 360-degree view of the skyline.
It’s well worth it because this also includes displays of how the building was constructed, which is fascinating. The deck that links the two skyscrapers together was assembled on the ground and then hoisted up into place over the course of seven hours, all 1,100 tonnes of it! What results is a huge area on top of two skyscrapers, preventing the buildings from being “vertical cul-de-sacs” and making travel around this city truly three-dimensional.
