Travel Preview - Osaka Japan

It's time to get back into the swing of my travels through Japan that I paused on my old blog with a trip to Mount Nokogiriyama in Chiba Prefecture.  I've been very privileged to travel to Japan three times now, and I still haven't quite touched on my third trip, but before we can move on, I wanted to talk a bit about my next destination of Osaka.

When I travel, especially to Japan, I try to pick locations along major routes of travel, a city to stay in with easy access to the railways, and then branch out.  This sort of hub procedure works well in Japan since you can reach almost anywhere by train, or by extension trains and buses or other transport that is available locally.   Osaka is one such place, a fairly major city within reach of several major locations such as Kyoto, Himeji, Mount Koya, among others which I wanted to visit.

Osaka is a major city, a castle town, and a gastronomic paradise.  It was chosen by the warlord Hideyoshi as his capital when he became Shogun in Japan in 1583.  Hideyoshi was a general of the warlord Oda Nobunaga who sought to unify Japan. After Nobunaga died Hideyoshi sought to end centuries of war and suceeded where many before had failed.  Building the castle in Osaka, he wished to establish a lineage, but did not succeed, but his efforts paved the way for centuries of peace that followed when his retainer Tokugawa Ieasu became shogun.

The castle of Osaka is a recreation, but it still stands as a monument to a man's dream, and the city that grew out around it has always been a haven for commerce and delicious food for centuries in Japan.

I wanted to get a "flavor" of  Osaka so to speak, along with the hope that we might catch some cherry blossoms since spring was just starting.  We were in luck for the most part!   I wanted a view of Osaka Castle itself, and I found one in the Hotel New Otani Osaka Park.  The hotel looks right over the park, with views of the castle and the city itself, AND it is a short train ride from the two main stations where one can catch the rails all around the province.

Another great part about my pick was it was a short ride to Dotonburi, which is a famous food street along a canal where one can literally go from one end of the street to another and eat the most remarkable local street foods.  Unfortunately, we never got there but I will link to a video which extols the virtues of this place, and I fully intend to return there someday.

On the whole though, my opinions of Osaka the city are very limited.  It seems like a very large, drab city from personal experience.  There was not a lot of color or context that I could add from just traveling through it, with a lot of old apartments and warrens of streets.  This sort of thing is common in Japanese cities, and even Tokyo has it to an extent, but Tokyo always seems brighter and cleaner than any other city even in Japan somehow.

But Osaka is a great gateway to many other things, and those are the things I will talk about in my upcoming blogs.