3.3 Shin Umeda City, Osaka (December 21st)#

We bid farewell to Izumo in the early morning. After transferring to the Shinkansen at Okayama, it was already nearly 1:00 PM by the time we arrived at Shin-Kobe Station.

After taking a taxi to our hotel to drop off our luggage and grabbing a hurried lunch, it was past 2:00 PM. We hadn’t planned anything specific for the rest of the day, but seeing that it was still early, we made a spontaneous decision to head over to Osaka. (I will detail the transportation logistics for this trip in a later chapter).

We had two main objectives for this Osaka excursion: first, to see the Christmas illuminations at Shin Umeda City, and second, to fulfill a request from a close friend to hunt down souvenirs at the One Piece specialty store.

The walk from the subway station to Shin Umeda City is just over a kilometer—a distance that should have been a breeze. Unfortunately, I had severely underestimated the weather. Assuming Osaka would be milder, we hadn’t dressed in our “heavy armor.” We were met with a freezing drizzle, compounded by the intense wind tunnel effect created by the skyscrapers; the cold cut right to the bone. After struggling through the wind and rain to finally reach Shin Umeda City, the first thing I said to my wife was, “Let’s find somewhere to get a hot drink, immediately.”

It being the weekend, the place was teeming with visitors (mostly locals, it seemed). The café had a sixty-minute time limit for seating, which actually worked in our favor. Thanks to the rapid turnover, we didn’t have to wait long before we were seated, allowing us to enjoy some hot drinks and cake in the warmth and catch our breath.

The giant Christmas tree here is truly a sight to behold. Utilizing dynamic technology, the tree itself acts like a massive screen, shifting through dazzling patterns of light and shadow. This time, however, I didn’t raise my camera to record video. Perhaps the memory of Tokuyama—where I froze my hands stiff trying to capture a time-lapse—was still fresh in my mind. I had learned my lesson. Faced with the wind and rain, I stopped trying to capture everything through a lens and instead chose to simply etch that technological spectacle into my memory.

On the return leg, we strolled back to Osaka Station and visited the One Piece store on the 13th floor of the Daimaru department store, successfully completing our shopping mission!