It's high time I introduced you to my favorite place in Nagoya, Osu Kannon.
Osu is an older section of the city, so it has a lot of character. When you first walk into the heart of it, you see this fantastic temple. Often a priest can be heard chanting inside.
The temple is surrounded by concrete apartment complexes, hotels, and other very grey ugly buildings.
This section of Osu Kannon is sort of an outdoor shopping mall with lots of funky little shops. Most of them are cheap, and a lot of them are consignment or thrift stores. There is a "per gram" store where the cost of the used clothing is determined by how much it weighs. One gram = 30 yen. Many of these thrift stores have kimonos in them, but they're pretty old and yucky, and the ones that are nice aren't very cheap. There are some goth/lolita stores here too.
Today two of my friends and I went to a cafe we had heard of. It's called "Dear Alice" and has an Alice in Wonderland theme. The front door was so short you had to bend over to get in. Inside was a cozy little cafe full of Victorian furniture, playing cards and checkerboard patterns. Waitresses dressed in Alice-esque maid outfits served us cakes and tea in fancy china dishes. Check out the Christmas tree drawn with caramel sauce on my plate. It was awesome.
Osu has a lot of surprises. Here the giant lucky cat is decorated in glorious gaudy Christmas "illumination," as they call it here.
My friends and I went to an arcade and spent money trying to win prizes from crane games.
The Barbie pink "woman ahead" sign was in front of a section of the arcade dedicated to purikura, or tiny photo sticker booths insanely popular with Japanese girls. So popular in fact, that only girls are allowed to use them, I guess. (If anyone can explain what the Japanese says on the sign, please let me know.) My friends and I decided to take a few.
Now, a good rule of thumb to remember in Japan is that anything the Japanese set their hand to, they take to the extreme. So these are not your ordinary photo booths. They're huge, they're well-lit, they talk and play music, they have a million different settings and options, and the stickers they print out are high-quality, full color and sometimes sparkly. After you take your pictures, you can use the touch-screen and stylus to draw hearts, stars, bunnies, text, or mustaches on your friends. Then the stickers are printed out with all your modifications. Girls put them on their cellphones, textbooks, cameras, pets, anywhere.
Outside the arcade we found a bunch of capsule toy machines. Right next to ones for children were a few that contained figurines that were most definitely pornographic. Yes, pornographic capsule toys. Right there on the street. 300 yen. As if breast pudding wasn't enough reason to worry about this country.
