First impressions: Exhausted after my 11hr flight from Paris, (having risen at 4.30am to get there from Manchester), arriving in Japan at 9.30am (the following day) I was struck, from the air, at how mountainous the country is. Great flat alluvial plains covered in a patchwork of agricultural and urban sprawl reached out toward the coast, laced with winding rivers, and separated by huge black mountain clusters. The interior of the country seemed a quite forbidding mass of dark peaks. I was arriving from the north, having traversed northern China and the arctic circle, in a line from Paris that went North-North-East cutting through the Baltics toward northern Russia. Now coming south, the plane was crossing the Japanese mainland towards the southern bay on whose eastern shores lie the city of Osaka, and in whose waters the industrious Japanese have built the vast airport named for this south western region, Kansai.
But once the cheerful but tedious formalities of finger-printing, photographing, interviewing and passport checking that make entry to Japan similar to that of the US (if a little less daunting), and the queues for baggage, and then for the train station where I exchanged my voucher for my Japan Rail Pass (a must-have), were finally over, and I was on the 50minute train from the airport to the centre of Osaka, the mountains seemed very far away. Instead, an overwhelming sense of dense – intense – urban sprawl flashed by the windows of the train, with the mostly grey buildings slowly but surely getting taller, gradually, gradually beginning to seem a little less haphazard – but still as tightly packed – as the US-style grid of the city centre grew nearer, and the occasional wide street that shot off dead-straight into the distance flashed by. Eventually even the little houses were four or five stories, dwarfed by the towers and apartment blocks of Shin-Osaka.
After almost thirty minutes wandering increasingly desperately around this huge railway station, I eventually found the ‘North Exit’ – the only one for which there were no signposts, and not even an ‘Exit’ sign at the door, yards from which lay my hotel. At wits end, 1pm local but 4am UK time, I managed to check in, actually delighted at the friendly and attentive concern and helpfulness of the staff.
So begins an adventure – 17 days in Japan!