Osaka by Night: a backstreet tour
Backstreet Tour of Osaka
Date visited: January 2020 (3 min read)
“Guess how many people in Japan are a hundred years old or more?”, asks Andy Kenji Marsden, the founder of Osaka Backstreet Tours.
Banjo, who is nine, thinks there could be 20 million, I guess a 1,000, Nick says 10,000 and Iris, our teenager, is the closest at 100,000. There are in fact almost 70,000 centenarians in Japan and the number is rising each year. The government used to give every person who turned a 100 a silver sake dish on their birthday, but when the cost blew out to over US two million they started using silver plate.
Andy has tailor-made our backstreet tour of Osaka to suit the kids, and holds their attention the whole way. We’ll be skipping the red-light district of Tobita, one of the few in Japan where prostitutes openly ply their trade, but we have coincided with the second night of the Ebisu Festival (See my story on the Ebisu Festival) so begin our tour at this shrine.
Then it’s on to the strip of novelty restaurants underneath the Tsutenkaku Tower. One features a “river” in which you can catch your own fish for dinner and another specialises in gargantuan portions for sumo wrestlers. They are revered in Japan, but the sport is usually dominated by Koreans. Andy is delighted that there are currently two Japanese champions. He takes us to the “best gyoza” place in town where we demolish 35 of the succulent suckers.
Janjan Yokocho arcade is a strip of tiny bars and restaurants, each one specialising in a particular dish or dishes. We watch male retirees play furious games of go and shogi (Japanese chess) in a boardgame club. Many of them are smoking; it’s no surprise the majority of the 70,000 centenarians are women. If we wanted, we could try our luck at the shooting stand or sample one of the hundreds of snacks in the dagashi-ya shop.
It’s at this point that we head in to Nishinari-ku, the down-at-heel area that Andy wants to show visitors. “The Yakuza operate here and everyone knows it which is why properties here are so cheap”, he tells us. The Yakuza are the mafia of Japan and currently number about 80,000. We trip down dark alleys, skirting household junk, wires and dangling cables. Even so many of the tiny houses are adorned with plants and at the end of one alley we come across a tiny well-loved shrine, squeezed in to a triangle next to the railway line.
Tucked underneath the Hanshin Expressway are houses with collapsed roofs and cracked windows. Some have caved in altogether. But, again, some are immaculate and a tiny restaurant even has a koi pond. Foreigners, in tandem with local partners, are buying up the cheap real estate. “For the Japanese, this area is tainted,” says Andy. We don’t venture in to the heartland of Nishinari-ku where about 4,000 homeless people live. “If you fall on hard times, you either end up here”, Andy tells us, “or you suicide. There’s no going back.”
On the way back to the bright lights, he buys us a takeaway plate of daikon, potato, tofu and fish cake in a 3-year-old broth of kelp from restaurant Oden Fukagawa. Hmm, this one is for aficionados only. It’s sour and seaweedy. Happily, the tour concludes in a neighbourhood izakaya where we scoff chicken yakitori and beef stew sitting on stools at a u-shaped counter top around the kitchen. Izakayas were surely the inspiration for American diners.
It’s gone 10pm by now and Andy is still at work, cracking jokes and telling us stories about his life in Japan. The kids are done in, but the night is one they will recall with delight. Because of our backstreet tour, Osaka will be by far their favourite Japanese city.
EXTRA
Backstreet tours kick off at 5.30 sharp at Daikokucho station. Andy employs several guides, but will often take Australians himself. We appreciated that. Y5,600 pp, or Y7,400 including dinner (2019). Private tours, such as ours which are tailor-made for kids, cost a little extra. https://backstreetosakatours.com
READ
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee will give you some context before you set out on your backstreet tour of Osaka. It focuses on the life of a young Korean girl who falls pregnant to a married yakuza and is offered salvation of sorts by a Japanese Christian passing through her village. The story follows 4 generations of Korean immigrants in Japan and is partially set in Osaka.
Anything by Haruki Marukami who is the most famous Japanese writer in the West. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood are reputedly the best.
I have to include Shōgun by James Clavell. I recall reading this in the 1970s. It is very passé these days but it is enthralling and the hero Blackthorne actually stays in Osaka Castle, which would be nice to recall when you visit.