From Oshare to Osake
From Kobe to Rokkomichi around Osaka Bay
I had just finished work. The first place I found to eat in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Motomachi was a fashionable serve-yourself curry establishment. Two choices of curry - Thai or Japanese. I chose the Thai, I can get Japanese curry anytime. There was newly-hip genmai (brown rice) as well as the standard white rice. I had the brown rice with the thin grey Thai curry. The lift-up lid on the curry pot was facing the wrong way, leading to an awkward moment as I lifted up the whole lid instead of the hinged part, before I realised what had happened and rotated the lid back towards me. Poor attention to detail for Japan. From my angle at my seat, I could see the single staff member playing with her phone below the counter as she waited for new customers. The curry tasted good, but I couldn’t get enough food on the trendy thick misshapen plate without the watery curry risking pouring off the sides. I would need to go to a conbini.
I headed towards Kobe port. I had planned to head west round the coast towards Akashi bridge, but I had a meeting in Osaka in the evening, so instead I decided to head east towards Osaka instead.
It was one of those muggy, cloudy, but-not-actually-raining rainy season days. I left behind the mini dog walkers of Motomachi and entered a world of dating couples - smartly dressed and at various levels of awkwardness. A new museum had opened - Kobe Port Museum. A museum showing the history of Kobe Port? No, an art exhibition centre and mini aquarium - Kobe’s new oshare (fashionable) date spot, for a while at least. I wandered around it as I attempted to escape back to the coastal path. Gift shop selling expensive art things, lots of stuffed sea creature toys, over-priced restaurant, and there was no way out except the way I came in.
The coastal path was blocked by construction - a new sports complex/exhibition centre/fashionable place. On the other side of the road Ferrari, Mini and BMW all shared a glitzy new-build showroom. I walked on, past warehouse after warehouse of those big Japanese conglomerates - Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Mitsui - all of them flaky painted concrete with wafts of the smell of raw materials I couldn’t quite identify - flour, oil?
I found a conbini and bought some fried chicken to make up for the lack of meat in the Thai curry. The assistant at the cash register was an old lady, not the usual college student staff - the portside is clearly too far for this demographic. She giggled and chatted happily.
“I’ll just arrange your coins, like this so I can count them better.” She arranged the coins in neat rows on the plastic coin tray.
“Thanks, I’m not sure I have the right coins… Oh, yes I do, look at that - perfect!”
“That’s perfect! Lucky!”
It was lucky, usually I’m one yen short and I have to sigh and break into a one-thousand yen note.
If you want friendly conbini service, clearly portsides are the way to go.
I kept trudging around the coast. Quite-nice, but not super-nice apartment buildings like those going up near the Port Museum (not a musuem), faced more of those California-style warehouses and rows of barges. These are the barges you see chained in rows heading up the coast under the Akashi bridge carrying who-knows-what who-knows-where in western Japan.
I passed Hyogo Prefectural Art Museum (a real art museum) with its Sun Sister statue gleaming dully beneath the cloudy sky, and an encouragement for the Japanese passion for upskirt-photo-taking if there ever was one. The oshare feel had long gone now, a homeless person’s spot was marked by single sheets of newspaper laid out neatly on a stone bench. The public toilets here were approaching UK levels of filth, a slowly twitching fly in its death throes on a ledge filled with its already dead predecessors.
I was forced inland, onto a road where all the trucks ferrying stuff to and from warehouses seemed to be. I had time for a quick visit to Sawanotsuru sake museum - closing in ten minutes. I whirled around the exhibition route, looking at the machinery and materials needed for each step in the preparation of sake (sometimes given the honorific prefix o to make osake - yes, I did think about my title!) I had to rush out of the back exit before the gate closed.
I drank some water in an overgrown park under the Harbor Highway, looking at a large ship, while a smaller one was loaded up with steel products nearby. Hidden behind a wall of jungly plants and a high wall was KOBELCO’s Kobe Steel works. The wall was broken by a gaping entrance - memories of Terminator and Black Rain. This marked the end of today’s walk, I turned up the hill, climbing towards Rokkomichi station and my meeting in Osaka.
It must be a corollary to Murphy's Law. You need to pay 425 yen and - obviously, unavoidably - you only have 424. Not 420, 421 or 423. You have exactly 424 bloody yen. Or the 1,000 yen note, of course.
Nice rough walk, by the way.