How dodgy and cheap places can be a heaven
Just like there is Tokyo tower in Tokyo, Osaka has its own tower called Tsutenkaku. The neighborhood is often covered by TV programs for its cheap food. Simultaneously, it is where you will find many people who live on daily wages, and one of the very few places in Japan where women are advised not to walk on their own.
But as we visited the neighborhood and walked into the old shopping street, we were captivated by number of places where money is not the condition to have fun: Signs show there are game arcades where you can play with 50 yen (60 US cents); Across the street lies a Kushi-yaki (skewers) restaurant, where you can buy a stick of meat skewers from price of 100 yen (about 1.2 USD). Or if you like, you can choose to play Smartball, what has eventually became Pachinko, which you can play for at least good ten minutes with that very coin. The neighborhood gives you an impression as if time has stopped a long time ago. The fact that you can buy anything with a mere 100 yen coin is such a rare encounter, that it reminded me of the time when I can buy a can of drink could be purchased with this very coin (which is at least 22 years ago). It is quite amazing that the area managed to preserve these places up and running for a very long time.
But the highlighted was definitely the Japanese chess room. The room offers customers a place to play Shogi, Japanese chess, or Go, another board game which is played across East Asia. It costs 300 yen to play for an hour, or 1000 yen at max if you play for the entire day. The room is obviously offering a quiet yet interactive place for the people who get together. A scene which is quite hard to encounter in modern Japan, and rather, reminded me of the atmosphere in parks in China.
A recent survey reports that Osaka was ranked 12th as a city that is easy to live in. That is the highest rank in fact for an Asian city. When I heard that I was not quite sure what it meant. For people who live in Tokyo, Osaka seems equally crowded and perhaps even noisier than this rival city. But now I tend to believe that now.
