Universal Studios Osaka

As Anne had mentioned in the previous blog we spent last weekend in Osaka. Osaka is the second largest city in Japan and home to our weekend’s destination Universal Studios. In an attempt to save money and following my traveling goal to see as much as possible in as little time as possible we embarked on our journey at 6am on Saturday May 23rd. After taking a couple subway lines to Tokyo station we boarded the Tōkaido Hikari Shinkansen at 7:03am and arrived in Osaka at 10:03am. After taking a couple more train rides we arrived at Universal Studios at about 10:45am. We had been prepared to see long lines at each of the rides, but were surprised to find out that attendance to the park was very low due to the recent concerns over the swine flu. As a result we were able to ride all of the rides we wanted to and watch several shows. Since attendance was low for the day a couple rides were closed as well as a good number of the restaurants/food stands. The Universal Studios in Osaka turned out to be pretty similar to the Universal Studios I had previous been to in Orlando, though I recall the one in Orlando being more fun. This was likely because I had gone in the 80s or very early 90s so most of the movie based rides where less dated. Anne’s favorite ride was the Terminator 2 – 3D, and though I enjoyed several of the rides I am hard pressed to choose a favorite. One major difference we have noticed regarding theme parks in Japan verses the US is that unlike people from the States, who typically where shorts and a t-shirt to the park, the Japanese consider theme parks to be a high fashion event. At least half of the women wear high heels (on average 4 inches), and regularly use large personal mirrors (or take up the ones in the restrooms) to appraise and touch up their appearance. Another difference that Anne addressed in her previous entry is the behavior of children in the park. You very rarely hear screaming or crying regardless of the age of the child/infant. It is really quite impressive. To give you an example of how well behaved children are in Japan I will use the following scenario. First you should know that eating and drinking while walking is consider bad etiquette here. So when parents buy candy for their children at a store, children will hold the candy in their hands and stare at it intently (but with out unwrapping it, eating it, or making any complaint as to wanting to eat it sooner.) until they arrive home. Arriving home on average takes between 30 minutes to an hour. This behavior arises from a very core Japanese ideal that one should always be mindful of the needs of the whole instead of the needs on one’s self as coined by the popular Japanese phrase “the nail that sticks up, gets hammered down”. Anyways, after a quick stop off at a tako (that’s octopus in Japanese) ball food court (remember Anne LOVES tako balls) we headed to Hotel Granvia Osaka and checked into our room at about 10:00pm. The following day we got to sleep in (as we had seen most of Osaka on a previous trip) and took the train back to Tokyo arriving home at about 5:30pm. As a whole the trip was a good one, with the only bad points being that I was unable to prevent our ship captain from stirring into JAWS infested waters and Anne getting lost following the yellow brink road (how did we get to the Ghirardelli in San Francisco?).