Tonyobyo in Tokyo: 14th & 15th September, 2013

14th September 2013

Today we left our beautiful hotel in Suidobashi (I highly recommend both the suburb as a place to stay and Niwa as a hotel), Tokyo to continue on down to Osaka. We have done this trip with no planning whatsoever besides booking accommodation and had not really thought through pre-reserving our seats on the Shinkansen. The lovely gentleman at Suidobashi station happily booked us some seats on the 13:03 Shinkansen to Osaka from Tokyo station, which was entirely covered by our JR Rail Passes, including the seat reservation (a saving of about 14000Y).

We battled our way through Tokyo station and found our Shinkansen. I loved the Shinkansen travel: we need these in Aus! The train was sleek and fast, reaching speeds of up to 300km/hour. The seats were comfortable and had huge amounts of leg room - about twice, if not 3 times the amount of leg room on standard plane seats. We were able to store most of our baggage in the racks above and kept 1 large bag in front of us, which easily fitted due to the room. The chairs also reclined back ridiculous amounts allowing for easy sleep.

Once we arrived in Osaka we swapped to the local Midosuji line (tickets about 230Y, not covered by the JR Rail Pass) and walked from the stop to our hotel, where we got ridiculously lost. The informations clerk had told us to walk down the Subway to Kitahama Subway station and walk from there (You can walk quite a bit of Osaka underground in the Subway), but we couldn't get our bearings underground and went up the surface to ask some poor hapless Japanese lady for directions. She was amazing. I don't know if I have mentioned how much I love the Japanese people, but gee I wish Australians were more like them. They will do EVERYTHING in their power to help you. This beautiful lady, who didn't speak a bar of English, basically walked 15 minutes out of her way to lead us directly to our hotel, which she didn't even know where was and would stop and ask directions along the way, in appalling heat. When we arrived at the hotel we had her and another man whom we'd asked directions from basically lead us right in.

I pretty much decided I will become 'Japanese' in my principles when I return home, although in Australia it is not as safe to help people out unfortunately. Japan feels much much safer than home.

15th September, 2013

Today almost didn't go as planned. Initially when we were looking at booking Japan, we had decided to be in Osaka for this date specifically, as we knew the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri was on, and wanted to experiance a Japanese festival.

I know I said I wouldn't talk Diabetes in this blog, and would save it for my other blog, but in this case it affected our day. Last night I went to bed with 2 failed set changes (and massive bruises from 1 to boot), and a change in insulin, after having sat at about 17 for 12 or so hours. Couldn't get my BGs down no matter how many corrections I did. Anyway, after the change of insulin they came down...and kept going down. I basically spent the night battling hypos. At one point my pump suspended itself and flashed a message on the screen to get help - it presumed I was unconscious.

So basically zero sleep for either of us, so we slept in until 10am (I had planned for us to be at the festival at 10am). After dragging ourselves still tired from bed, we discovered it was raining, so we went down to ask the hotel staff if they knew the festival was still on. The reply was: "Yes, in rain. But maybe typhoon or hurricane later, not so good". As you can imagine, we didn't feel too safe with that comment.

We decided to risk it anyway and continued on to the festival, arriving at just after 1pm.

Oh my gosh! It was amazing. We have nothing like it in Australia. Scratch that, health and safety wouldn't allow it into Australia.

It was raining, there were crowds, umbrellas everywhere. The streets were lined with Japanese festival food (mmm Kara-Age chicken!!!), lanterns were hung (and thoughtfully sealed in rain-proof casings). The streets were closed off and throngs of people lined the sidewalks.

Every 5 minutes or so you could hear a loud banging of drums and slowly small figures dressed in Black shirts and white pants would start to trickle into the blocked off streets. Their numbers would grow as the drums came nearer, and you could see them pulling a large, thick rope behind them. The pullers looked exhausted, their white pants see through in the cold rain and sheer tiredness etched onto their faces. I think even their braided hair looked beat. Add to that fact that they were all children - both boys and girls - and I was amazed at their determination (The festival goes over 2 days and starts at 10am and finished late afternoon to night, so who know how long they had been at it for).

Hugh & I were positioned at a corner, and this is where all the action happened. After 20 or 30 meters of the pullers ran past you would see a float approach the corner, coming from an inside mall (Yep they pulled the float through an undercover arcade-style mall). The pullers stopped and readied themselves to heave on the rope. They would take off in a sprint, faces pained and round the corner. The float would hurtle along with them, rounding the corners and almost bowling into the street sides (I did hear somewhere shops keepers take out an insurance during the festival in case a float smashes into their shop.) Atop each float was some guys who must have had amazing balance, as they danced and jumped like crazy as the float sped around the corner.

Insane. I loved it & didn't want to leave.