Trip to Osaka: Shinsaibashi

During the first week of being at JCMU (Japan Center For Michigan Universities) I somehow found myself going to Osaka and going on a small shopping spree...well it was more like buying one thing...ok...maybe a couple of things! Two students wanted to go to Osaka to find a specific shop called Bodyline, go to Den-Den Town, and also do some general shopping.

FYI: This might be a long post.

 Bodyline is a shop that caters to Cosplayers, Lolitas, Maids, and so on. I know of this place because of being apart of the Maid Cafe back at my University.

Now getting to this place is a interesting but fun experience. First it started with actually trying to find the location of this place in Osaka, and we weren't exactly able to find the exact location. Google Maps is awesome but it can only go so far when the you don't understand Japanese addresses. So then we were left with this:

and this...

 and then there was this!

You would think that I would be overwhelmed with all the people and the stores. The people no, the stores yes. Shinsaibashi is one of Osaka main shopping centers, in the past the bridges (if you can see further back there is another bridge on the other side and I'm not for certain about the other side.) were built by merchants so that they would be able to sell their wares on the opposite side of the river. Because of those bridges the population around the river boomed and the maintenance of the bridges continued until they were what you see in the picture above. Also when we were here you could definitely tell that this where everyone would meet to chat and go shopping, ahem the picture below is another reason why there were a lot of people in this specific reason.

This the infamous Gilco sign that lights up at night, we were definitely not there long enough to it when it comes on, but it looks really cool, so I've heard. Also I noticed and so did the other girls, that some of the Japanese people taking pictures in the same pose as the man above. I initially thought that I wanted to to do it too to obviously post on here, but then I remembered how the Japanese feel about foreigners. So I thought about it and then seeing the people do it made me think about what is actually the difference between the two. (Japanese & Foreigners taking this picture) Japanese people taking the photo is perfectly fine, foreigners taking it, it seems bad and 'oh they are foreigners...' which makes it seem bad. So not wanting to be the stereotypical foreigner we decided to continue to find stores.


Shopping Results:

These red shoes, are for my maid outfit for next year! The funny thing is, is that they are too big...In Japanese size, I thought my shoe size was a 26, and it turns out that it's actually a size 25. They are too cute so I'll work with them anyways.

Yay :D

Later on that day after looking for Bodyline, we turned our sights to Osaka's Den-Den Town! What's Den-Den town you ask? It's similar to Akihabara, what's Akibahara. In a nutshell it's specific town's electronics, gaming centre. That's the only way I can explain it. I think the closest thing I can compare it to is, Silicon Valley, but really there is nothing in America that you can compare it to.

Anyways we didn't get to go too much into Den-Den town due to it getting late and also the schedule of train back to Hikone. We actually went to the Namco Arcade Museum, which was super awesome!! Three floors of arcade games, there was an entire floor dedicated to Tekken, and had life size figures of Heihachi & Jin? I couldn't take a picture of it because of Japan's strict laws of picture taking. So pictures...yeah...anyways we spent some time in there then walked a little further into Den-Den town and saw this awesome store!

This store had walls full of models...not really action figures...but models the entire store! Two floors! They even had a life size model of Lupin the III & Jigen. Of course I didn't take a picture of it, but I did manage to take a picture of something...because it was just too freakin' cool to pass up!

  This picture is like my childhood, look at all of those Dragon Ball figures, I swear I spent maybe 20 minutes looking at this glass case. Long story short we spent about in hour in there, I bought one thing, one of the girls bought a bunch of Bleach things. (Bleach is a really popular anime series in the US and in Japan.) After walking tiredly back to the train station our wait for the train started. I think we had to wait about a half an hour before the train came, but we had two choices, take the Express or the Local. The Local came before the Express, but the Express train would only stop at certain spots, the Local would obviously stop at all of the Local stops. 

It was my first time in Osaka, and it was their second time in Osaka and so none of us was familiar with the train system, so we decided to take the Local train. Needless to say we didn't get back to the dorms until 10:30pm

So Exhausting, I don't even remember the next day. 

Such a long post!! Overall I was excited to go to a shopping centre so early, I was able to see more of what the average Japanese consumer is exposed to when they are shopping. In each culture the consumer shops in different ways, so I wonder what is the mind set of Japanese people when they shop. Before coming here I watched a lot of CNN International and they did a story on the Chinese Consumer. One of the ideas they kept repeating was: "The Chinese Consumer will either go for the most expensive thing or the cheapest thing."  with that statement it made me wonder about the Japanese, since Japan is known for making crazy things...just curious. 


Shopping Results:

A Battle Torn Goku from the shop above. I had to get one and I'll probably get another one because they are just so cool.

No. I'm not an Otaku.

-A