Osaka's DenDen Town

Osaka's DenDen town doesn't quite have the craziness of Akihabara but it does have a heavy focus on electronics of all sorts. Anime is there too, mostly off the main street. There were a few lost looking maids handing out flyers along the sidestreets and it looked like the maid cafe phenomenon has made some inroads into this area but it was mainly folks looking to buy electronics or cheap merchandise. There was also what seems to be a mythical Lawson's 100 yen store where things like a 500ml Coke were 105 yen whereas every other convenience store sells them for exactly 147yen (to beat the 150yen price of the vending machines).

I didn't notice this until after looking at the picture but that SuperPotatoPC place mentions all sorts of retro gaming systems like the Famicom, PC Engine (Turbografx16 in the US), Dreamcast, etc. I should have actually gone inside. :)

In Osaka many names that would normally be translated with 'n' sounds used 'm' in romaji. Like Dotombori in hiragana is どとんぼり or a station nearby, Namba was なんば. Japanese doesn't really have the standalone 'm' sound but it was pretty consistently used this way here and nowhere else I've seen so far.

Going back to Dotombori, once it got dark a few groups of young guys in suits who spent a lot of time on their hair seemed to stand around and not do much besides smoke in some of the more crowded areas. They seemed to be having fun though.

大阪 Osaka

Osaka's an interesting town. It's kind of like Tokyo, only a bit smaller, and if anything, even more people seem to smoke here. The food's been great, Dotombori (Bladerunner inspiration?) is kind of a crazy shopping mall/restaurant neighborhood. Osaka-jo has a great 360 degree view from the top of it. The outside of the castle is restored to something similar to the original but the inside is basically a small musem, stairwells, and even an elevator due to the complete(?) reconstruction of it in the 90s.

By the way, the matcha (green tea) softserve ice cream here is addictive. Some places have a ton of flavors and when you buy one they load in a softserve cartridge into the machine that then dispenses the ice cream.