Day 12

Today we finally made it to Osaka! The ‘group excursion’ mentioned in the program description was actually a gathering of students. The Japanese students were our guides and they got us safely to Osaka castle, though with no leader, democracy took us about twice as long to get there. The grounds surrounding the castle are very large and filled with all sorts of stuff, monks,

gardens,

 food stands, souvenir shops, a baseball diamond, the original castle walls and moat - but my favorite part was the castle, even though it is actually a reconstruction and is outfitted as a museum. Here is a picture: 

We started out at the top of the castle and worked our way downward. Here is a view from the top including a part of the castle:

The museum was pretty cool, even if most of the descriptions were in Japanese. The 7^th floor (8 was the top), was an biographical exhibit on the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and was filled with little movies depicting different parts of his life. Here is what one looked like:

The next level was on the Summer Wars, then the four after that were museum pieces of armer, weapons, art, and poetry. Here is Sanada Yukimura’s armor:

(Remember with Japanese names, the family name comes first, then the personal name. So Sanada Yukimura is Yukimura of the Sanada clan. Oddly enough, he never went by Yukimura while he was alive, if I remember corrctly, his name was something like Nobushige. But sometime after his death, some writer called him Yukimura and the name stuck. I don’t know why. He lived in the Sengoku period and fought in the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 against Tokugawa Ieyasu.) (Note from Myra: that is the battle mentioned at the end of Shogun, Ieyasu is the daimyo Blackthorne follows. Osaka castle is the castle where Ishida and the ministers meet, the without-a-flaw castle.)

Here is a model of the castle and its grounds:

After the castle, we broke into two groups - one bound for Kobe and the few remaining set out for the Kaiyukan (aquarium). Since we were hungry, we ate lunch/dinner at a chinese restaurant, then we lost everyone but us and a Japanese girl named Eri. 

The aquarium was way cool. Check out the entry:

The highlight of the aquarium are the whale sharks, which lives in the world’s largest tank, 5,400 cubic meters of water and about 6 stories high. 

And here are some little crabs:

The very last, and really it was the very last, thing we went to in the aquarium was the touching pool where we could pet sting rays and sharks, and Eri dropped her purse in the pool and soaked her phone and it wouldn’t turn on. It was then we found that she is prone to panic attacks and she doesn't speak very good English. Fortunently, she was able to lead us to a Koban (police box), and one of them spoke English and was able to explain to us why she had broken out in heartbreaking sobs. I guess she was very attached to her phone. Here is a picture of the Koban:

It was an adventure, but we ended up getting back much later than planned, so I had to adjust my alarm.

A long but overall fun day.