IT was past midnight of February 27 in Osaka, Japan, only a little over 24 hours since we arrived in this beautiful capital city of the Osaka Prefecture—courtesy of Cebu Pacific, the Philippines’s largest carrier, which had flown in a small group of media professionals for a four-day familiarization tour—and, of course, I knew it was chilly, even freezing, outside. I was, however, in desperate need of some strong shots of black coffee if I were to survive the next hours with eyes wide open to get some work done before catching an hour—or two, if I were lucky—of sleep.
Terribly worn-out from the day’s tours—the hugely popular Universal Studios Japan theme park, the Floating Garden Observatory of the Umeda Sky Building, the Osaka Castle—I couldn’t bring myself to put on anything else beyond my shoes and the Uniqlo lounging set I had brought along for sleeping. It made for a strange fashion statement, I admit, but never mind that. I took the elevator down to the lobby of the modern Cross Hotel (www.crosshotel.com/osaka/), where we had been billeted for the night, and quickly ushered myself out onto the hotel’s sidewalk to buy coffee at the Lawson convenience store just a short block away.
The cold wind promptly hit me like a frozen sledgehammer. The temperature must have been in the low 1°C, and there were all these smartly dressed locals in their fur-lined black parkas and trenches bustling about, passing me by, perhaps a few wondering if this odd-looking, brown-skinned foreigner standing on the sidewalk in loungewear—in a thick cotton, yes, but still cotton—in freezing weather was certifiably insane.
I didn’t mind. After quickly recovering from the initial shock of bitterly cold wind, I embraced the chill and greedily took in the clean and very cold air as I ambled to the Lawson store. There, I browsed through merchandise whose labels and literature I wouldn’t have been able to decipher even if my life depended on it, ultimately buying four cans of very strong espresso that I hoped would give me enough buzz to let me finish my work. (It did.) “Arigatou gozaimasu!” I said to the genial elderly man manning the cashier as I collected the canned javas I’d just paid for, punctuating my thanks with a bow straight from the waist. He smiled a genuinely genial smile and said the same and did the same.
For a moment there, I was tempted to repeat the process to further underscore my appreciation of his help when I was fumbling through my payment in coins that were foreign to me, but then the voice of Tito Valiente—BusinessMirror film and media critic, Japanologist and a longtime friend—rang in my ear: “However tempted you may be to bow again after a Japanese returns the gesture, don’t—unless you both want to be exchanging bows through eternity.”
On my way back to the hotel, as I resisted the temptation to explore a side street vibrant with lights and late-night life, I wondered again if I had been a Japanese in a previous life, as my sense of deep affinity for all things Japanese had not been banished by neither the reality of earlier trip to Nagoya (also courtesy of Cebu Pacific) nor this tour of Osaka, which according to Wikipedia is “the largest component of the Keihanshin Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Japan and among the largest in the world with nearly 19 million inhabitants. Situated at the mouth of the Yodo River on Osaka Bay, Osaka is Japan’s second largest city by the daytime population after the Tokyo 23 wards, and serves as a major economic hub.”
Also according to Wikipedia, Osaka was “historically a merchant city…known as the ‘nation’s kitchen’ and served as a center for the rice trade” during the Edo period, also known as the Tokugawa period, considered a golden age in Japan when the country experienced robust economic
Image credits: Photos by Rosemarie B. Razon
