Time Traveling Through Osaka: Ghost Stories, Old Cafés and Nostalgic Streets

The day I started writing this article was the equinox, but today is just another “normal” autumn day in the northern hemisphere, more specifically in Kobe, forty minutes away from Osaka. Today is September 28, and it marks exactly 68 days since I arrived here in Japan’s Kansai region.

Today is a sunny, warm day. No rain, no floods, no typhoon; just a “normal day”, a perfect day for recollecting memories.

I can feel the “Atsusa samusa mo Higan made” (The saying means that neither extreme heat nor cold lasts beyond the equinox). In my own words : “We definitely slapped the door shut to the hot, sweaty, humid, grasping air environment of my first days in Osaka, and we’re entering a new season.

It’s a reflective, profound, mystical season. A moody season, an “I need  more sleep” season, a kaidan season.  It feels like Halloween season for Americans, El Dia de Los Muertos for Mexicans, ‘Obon for Japanese?’ but here it’s happening along my very own timeline.

Is it only my mood, or is everyone feeling this shift in the space-time continuum? Well grab your gears because I feel we will be traveling timelines together. Are you ready?

I realized that Obon, the Japanese festival of dead, actually takes place in the summer. It was through this that I discovered Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, a gathering of one hundred supernatural tales.

As someone who likes ghost stories I had to do some research and share it with you. Well,  essentially, it’s a spooky game, a “test of courage”, that samurai used to play in the summer, during the Edo period. They’d gather at night in a dark room lit by hundreds of candles. Each person will tell a ghost story then blow out a candle: ninety-nine ghost stories to freak everyone out in complete darkness.

It became popular among the warrior class, spread to the townspeople and now heavily influences modern J-horror movies.

Old folks believed the shiver and the goosebumps from being afraid had a cooling effect, desired in the sweltering summer heat. “No wonder there were so many rituals and celebrations in July.” 

I haven’t attended any Kaidan, ghost story sessions since I’ve been here but I definitely witnessed festivals and rituals in summer whose purposes are spiritual purification.

Back in the days old folks didn’t blame summer sickness on bacteria or heatstroke. They believed these sudden epidemics were the work of Goryō, the vengeful, angry spirits of people who had died unjustly.  

On July 24, a few days after I arrived, I took a train early in the morning to watch the Hokonagashi, the opening ritual of Osaka Tenjin Matsuri, a famous summer festival in Japan.

I wasn’t the only tourist there on the bridge, watching priests, well dressed people and kids performing the ceremony. I scribbled in my journal information I found online about the ceremony but the ink faded away. So I asked Google to revive my memory. 

The sacred object : at the center of the ceremony is a Kamihoko, the wooden spear. The action: A Shinto priest, a musician and a chosen boy referred to as “Shindo” (divine child) board a wooden boat to release ‘Kamihoko’, the sacred object into the Okawa river.

This act honors a 1000-year-old legacy, where the exact spot of the spear’s landfall was historically designated as  “Angu”, the temporary sacred site to host the deity. The purpose : Purify the city and its citizens from bad luck, sickness and spiritual impurities. 

I remember they threw paper effigies shaped as humans (Katashiro) into the river, apparently to absorb the physical illness and the misfortune of the citizens. I remember also that the divine child acts like a pure, untainted bridge between the human and the gods.

Well, that’s what remains in my notebook. 

Then we marched to the Osaka Tenmangu shrine, under a blazing sun and I observed many people dressed up in beautiful traditional clothes and vendors setting up their food stalls or what we call Yatai, preparing for the two days and nights of festivities. 

These images and information made me stop and reflect for a long time. It made me want to come back to my first pictures, when I just arrived in Japan.

Time traveler! There’s something about  ‘first times’, isn’t there?

The first time on a JR line, the first neon lights, the first walk in Namba, the first time I saw Dotonbori, the first time in a Don Quijote and the first “I’ll never go there again”, the first “Should I get in?”, the first sushi place, the first jazz kissa, the first Lantern facade, the first vending machine at 4 am, the first coin laundry, the first “Shōtengai” arcade street, the first weird street, the first Kissaten, and the first express train to Nara or Kyoto.

So many firsts and now the nostalgia of “I only have a few days left” starts creeping in. 

Well that day felt like a special day, a day when I’m allowed to write something weird, odd, dark about spirits and ghosts.  A day where I was wearing layers of black for the first time since I’m here, a proof that we just passed through a cosmic gateway. No?

But today is another ‘normal day’, a day for editing what I wrote this week. A day where it’s so tempting to give AI my paragraph and let it correct me, write for me smart and beautifully put together lines about Higan, “a threshold surrounding the autumn equinox where day and night sit in perfect, fleeting balance” like it says.

I learned today that yin and yang is not about opposite forces, not about good and evil, and surprisingly, not even about balance. It’s about transformation and flow. Like day and night or summer and autumn, they don’t fight for balance they simply dissolve one into another.

It made me think that Japan captures perfectly the essence of temporal harmony. From this selection of images you can see and feel what I’m trying to picture. The past, the present and the future, don’t compete here, like the seasons, they simply co-exist all at once.

Today, I’m just remembering days that will never come back (only if I time travel back) and editing pictures that I took two months ago, accepting that nostalgia is part of the game and that soon I’ll probably be somewhere else, writing about other memories. 

In some parts of Osaka, you can really experience nostalgia, if you enjoy this feeling like me, just by walking down some shōtengai, shopping arcades where half the shutters are down and the signs are old, you may find old washing machines and other things from decades ago.

If you keep walking without plans, no GPS and without rushing around, you might find yourself in a ghost town vibe street; and having a breakfast at a kissaten held by an old Japanese couple while listening to very old records. Cash only, please! It feels like walking through a dream of 1970.

Well, Saturday felt like a day when I’m allowed to trust that little voice inside of me that knows best but that often I doubt. A day without planning, a day when I can free-fall down from the slide without pressing my feet against the barrier to create resistance. Yes, a day without the self-imposed control mechanism to slow myself down. A day when I can finally surrender. 

Just another ‘normal day’, where I’m editing this article from the kitchen table in an old Japanese house, a perfect house for Obon and Rosoku Morai. 

Kafka The Listening Bar

Maybe it’s the energy of the house or the early Halloween Skeleton that I see every time I have a seat to smoke my cigarette in the designated area that makes me feel in a Kaidan mood today, and a nostalgic one apparently.  Maybe, I should go out tonight to a listening bar. I just had a thought about my favorite listening bar in Osaka, Kafka!

This a place I’d like to experience again and again. When I was there, the bartender who also act as the selector played some tracks by Bjork which I enjoyed. I love the place, the excellent whisky selection and the bartender’s recommendations. What I found it particularly exquisite was how he personally accompanies clients to the door to see them off.

The voice I’m talking about is my intuition, my internal GPS. The one that will tell me to take the 250 yen breakfast offer from FamilyMart, a coffee and an onigiri, because even if I’m going to eat an egg toast for breakfast, an onigiri in the bag is always welcome. The voice that tells me to get extra rest today, which parts of my body I need to stretch, when I need to get out of the house and where to go, and to bring a hoodie and an umbrella even if it’s a sunny day. 

So here I am, heading to my favorite park, GPS off, with my laptop, my headset, a water bottle and the onigiri in my bag, with no hesitation. I’ll meet you there in approximately 15 minutes or so. 

15:15. I made it in less than 30 minutes and 2000 steps, with two stops. The 1st at an art and café space because that art chair outside tagged with  ‘no to fascism’ caught my attention and the second stop at Lawson to get some snacks and a sparkling water, grape is my flavor. I didn’t look at the GPS once, and when I saw the gold laughing Buddha I knew I was almost there. I’m not trying to be extra deep today; I’m just trying to say that intuition is like a muscle we need to train from time to time. 

I’m sweating, shoes off, writing station set up, ready. I even found a use for the teddy bear hoodie. Of course mosquitoes are annoying like anywhere near a grassland, but I’m feeling grateful.

I admit it : I tend to be a loner with a nostalgic soul. I’m drawn to weathered and authentic spaces that hold memory. While I don’t dislike modern progress and technology, I feel much more at ease in these kinds of environments. Osaka, despite its futuristic reputation, is a city that gave me countless opportunities to step back in time and embrace my solitude without ever feeling lonely.

I should write a full article about the kissaten cafés and izakayas I visited as they were absolute highlights of my stay. In the morning, I’d enjoy my iced coffee and egg toast in a quiet kissaten café. At night I would sip a highball, eat yakitori, smoke a cigarette and have a chat with the locals who kindly helped me navigate the Japanese menu.

As a current artist-in-residence at the Osaka journal, I finally have the luxury of doing what I like the most : spending my time writing about my experiences completely guilt-free. You know that feeling when it’s pouring rain outside, you have absolutely nowhere to be, so you can eat your chips and watch J-horror movies (or maybe not), anime, in your pajamas the whole day, sous la couette? That feeling, the absolute best feeling.

It’s called ‘Dara, Dara’ in Japanese culture, ‘Traînasser’ in French, ‘lounging around’ or lazing the day away in English. For me writing evokes that exact same feeling. It is from that head space that I found myself wandering the streets of Osaka, taking photographs and writing. Sometimes I let my feet carry me all the way to Kobe. Easy ride train, always on time! Let me share with you my favorite way to go to Kobe just in case you ever feel like ‘flâner’, a little further away, just like me.

I will always, always take the Hanshin line from Sakaragawa station, to Motomachi station, with a transfer at Sannomiya or an 11 min walk. The ticket is 420 yen, it takes 40 minutes on the rapid express train. Best of all, there’s no running around, lost, in the massive labyrinth of Umeda station. Easy, rapid and convenient for a spontaneous day trip. 

Well navigating the city also brings unexpected revelations about its social fabric. Did you know that there are women-only passenger cars on many of Osaka’s lines? I certainly didn’t, I only discovered it recently. I was told that these designated cars exist for physical safety, driven by a specific word “Chikan”. Intrigued, I looked it up online. “The term chikan (痴漢, チカン, or ちかん) is a Japanese word that refers to an act of sexual harassment, groping, or non-consensual physical contact, most commonly occurring in crowded public spaces like trains and subways. It is also used to describe the perpetrator who commits these acts”.

I firmly believe that many countries should follow Japan’s example in this matter and learn from them in many other aspects of society. It shows how society is committed to order, respect and safety of its citizens and that’s why so many other solo-travelers and I feel absolutely safe and at home here.

As I sit here scrolling through the photos, my eyes linger on a few of them and catch one in particular, a snapshot of the river view at Temmabashikyomachi. It instantly reminded of my second week in that neighborhood, and realized how much time has passed since I first arrived. Back then I certainly never expected that I would end up performing my spoken word poetry at Compufunk, a place I had stumbled into just for a quick drink on my way back to my Airbnb room. Yet it did happen. Jerry Gordon and I performed something spontaneous, unrehearsed, and completely odd,  just the way I like it. 

Today felt like a Soba and writing day. Nothing beats hot wonton noodles on a rainy day. I went to that place I like in the neighborhood, authentic and affordable. You pay first, you eat after. You insert your money into that not-too-fancy machine, select what you want to order, and get your coins back. Then you sit at the counter and wait for your order while the chef makes it right in front of you, all while you’re enjoying the steamy atmosphere. There’s something emotionally comforting in that order of events. No need to wait for the bill. You finish, you leave. You know what I mean?

Who knew that I would grow feelings towards this place in just two months? You know that sweet, comfortable feeling when you come back home from a trip? I felt it many times after my travels to Kyoto or Kobe. Here’s to you Osaka, I’ll say it : I like you.

With love from Osaka,

Time traveller 'Sen 11'