Osaka-jo and the Moti-Francis experience 2014-05-31

When the rest of the group went off to try tracking down the Transportation and Human Rights museums, Francis and I were taking our normal leisurely pace through the rest of the Living Museum, and we decided to branch off to try our own side trip. So after we finished up the museum, we took a walk to the nearest Osaka Loop Line station, Temma, and hopped over to Osaka Castle.

We came in the back of the castle area, where the JR station is, and walked up on a large number of people waiting around outside Osaka-jo Hall for a Porno Graffiti concert to start. It took a couple of beats to remember that this is a band, but they’re actually pretty good.

We made our way up past the concert venue area, and walked up towards the castle. Like many of the castles now standing in Japan, it’s a reconstruction, as the actual castle had been destroyed decades ago. Different from many other large castles in Japan, though, this one had been destroyed and rebuilt a few times over the course of its history. As the final main castle of the Toyotomi family, who briefly ruled over Japan before the Tokugawa shogunate, it has a lot of symbolic resonance.

  It’s also just stunning, rising up in the middle of Osaka in the middle of a still-open space. You can’t really tell that it’s a reconstruction from the outside. As you walk up the slopes and around the battlements, you can get clear views of the castle, and imagine how imposing it must have been to come there when it was still a seat of power.

Once we reached the castle entrance, we found out that the interior now is devoted to a history museum, largely focusing on the period immediately before the third shogunate and Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself. While I find Hideyoshi a very interesting historical figure – he was of very low birth and infamously ugly, so you can imagine how charismatic and skilled he must have been to become the leader of Japan – Francis was not very interested in seeing the inside of the castle, and the entry fee was fairly steep, so we just watched some buskers and had ice cream before heading out a different gate.

We then walked towards Dotombori to meet up with the rest of the group, and spotted some interesting buildings a  long the way, like the NHK building above and to the right, or this Luther hotel on the left, attached to the Lutheran church. The contrast between the castle and surrounding buildings, like the NHK station, is very striking, and both were different from Dotombori, where we ended up next.