The best food we ate in Osaka was definitely Yakiniku at a place called Sora (空), which means “sky”. Pieces of pre-marinated meats are cooked on the grill, and everything was delicious.

Even though we were not in Hiroshima, we got to eat Okonomiyaki again. This time, there was a grill at our table and a server at the restaurant cooked it for us while we watched.

Osaka is also famous for deep fried skewers using different foods like chicken, squid, and veggies. The skewers are served with a special sauce and according to the local culture, double-dipping is highly frowned upon. We at this at a famous Japanese skewer restaurant called Daruma (だるま) with some friends in Osaka. My personal favourite was the kind with intestines.

Osaka Castle is another well known landmark in the city. Since the many wars that the castle has been involved in since its construction in the 16th century, the castle has now been restored and the inside has been converted into a museum with a rooftop observation deck.

We also visited the Osaka Science Museum. It was full of interactive exhibits that taught various concepts in the natural sciences, like magnetism, sound, air drag, and chemical reactions. The best exhibit was definitely the one on nuclear fission.

Takoyaki, another one of Osaka’s local delicacies, was also something we had to try. The ball is made of a batter and inside it, there are bits of octopus meat, and the entire thing is cooked in a special Takoyaki grill. After it is cooked, Takoyaki sauce and mayonnaise is added. It is interesting to eat since the outer shell is quite soft, but the octopus is not. The sauce also adds some sweetness to the flavour.

While I was no stranger to Takoyaki since I have had it previously, we got to try a kind that used egg for the outer shell rather than the batter. It was definitely new and special, but I have to say the regular kind was way better.

We also stumbled onto a restaurant called the “International Beer Museum” that had different beers from around the world on tap. It had been a long time since I had a Helles, so that’s what I got. I also realized that I haven’t been posting much about Japanese beer and the reason is that it is quite easy to get the same name brands in Vancouver (with the exception of Suntory Premium Malt’s) and they taste the same too!

I also didn’t think I’d be able to eat Currywurst in Japan either. Needed way more sauce though, but I understand that kind of sauce is probably hard to come by in Japan.

And I also didn’t think I’d see an Asian person wearing Lederhosen either.

Links to photo albums:

• Osaka
• Osaka Science Museum

Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) is a sort-of pancake that is made with batter, soba noodles, cabbage, meat, mayo, and really anything that people want in it. The “okonomi” part of the word means “whatever you like”, and “yaki” means “grilled”. This was at a place called Micchan (みっちゃん), which is one of Hiroshima’s most famous okonomiyaki chains, but my friend who has lived in Hiroshima for a bit told me that there were definitely better places to eat Okonomiyaki.

We visited the Atomic Bomb Dome (原爆ドーム), which is a building that symbolically represents the destruction of the atomic bomb. When the bomb exploded in the sky over the city, over 70,000 people died instantly. Some buildings managed to remain standing, and this was one of them. On one hand, it is a sad reminder of the history’s tragic past, and on the other hand, it speaks of the horrors of the use of atomic weapons. It was quite rainy that day, which added to the depressing effect of the history of the tragedy.

At the Children’s Peace Monument, there is a statue of a little girl holding up an origami crane. It commemorates a Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old at the time when the bomb dropped. Before her death from Leukemia at the age of 12, she folded 1,000 origami cranes, which according to an ancient Japanese legend, would grant her one wish. On the day we visited, a large group of people gathered around the statue reciting something together, presumably, the story of Sadako Sasaki.

Behind the statue are display cases full of origami cranes.

Another monument, the Peace Flame, has been lit since 1964 and will continue being lit until the world is free from nuclear weapons.

At the Peace Memorial Museum, a quote reads:

War is the work of man
War is destruction of human life
War is death
To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future
To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war
To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace

The purpose of the museum is to tell the story of Hiroshima, so that the same thing does not happen again anywhere else in the world. One of the artifacts at the museum is a simple watch, but it is stuck at the time 8:15, which is the time of the detonation.

This scale model shows the magnitude of the destruction. The red ball represents the location where the bomb exploded.

As a plea to end the use of nuclear weapons, every mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest to the country that performs any nuclear testing. There is definitely still more work to be done before this goal is reached.

Link to photos: here

For a few hundred yen (a few bucks), we were able to walk around the inside of the temple and admire its architecture.

While we were there, there was some sort of ceremony going on too, but I don’t know what it was.

Miyajima seems to be a quieter part of Japan that has less of the busy-modern-life feel even though it is so close to Hiroshima.

I had a “it’s coming right for us!” moment when I saw this deer approaching me. The deer then proceeded to chew on my friend’s shirt thinking it was food or something.

Humans and deer coexist here quite peacefully unlike in many urban areas where the animals are constantly starving.

Link to album here: here

One of my friends, who had spent 10 months in Hiroshima, had the idea of cooking Okonomiyaki.  It consists of a batter cooked like a crepe, but with soba noodles, cabbage and eggs plus whatever people feel like adding (cheese, bacon, etc.) with Japanese mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce, green onions, and katsuobushi (the dried fish flakes) on top.  My friend bought all of this stuff at this Japanese grocery store in his home town.

To begin, we started off by chopping up the cabbage, green onions and making the batter.  Since my flat did not have a large enough bowl, we ended up making the batter in a cooking pot.  It was quite difficult stirring the batter while adding in the flour without everything spilling.  Chunks of flour would always get stuck on the side of the pot too.  Once we finished the batter and cut up the veggies, we took out the teppanyaki grill.

At first, we didn’t oil up the surface before we started using the batter for the crepe layer, so it ended up sticking.  We couldn’t separate it to flip it either.  When we tried, we tore up the entire layer so bad that we didn’t try to proceed with that one.  We poured on some more batter and tried again, and the second time around, it worked slightly better – at least not so bad as the one before.

We added the cabbage on a vacant part of the grill and let the cabbage and crepe cook for a while before flipping the crepe over the cabbage.  We learned later that it was better to throw the cabbage directly onto the crepe and let both parts cook together.  Afterward, we started frying the Soba noodles.  We took the entire slab of noodles and spread it out as best we could on the grill.

Once the cabbage was sufficiently cooked, we moved the whole slab of cabbage and crepe and stacked it on top of the noodles and let that cook for a while.  Next came frying the egg.  We cracked the egg over the grill, popped the yolk, and swirled it around for a little bit to spread out the leaking yolk.  In the end, the egg just looked like a badly scrambled egg.  Then, we scooped up the stack of noodles, cabbage, and crepe and placed it on top of the egg.  After letting the egg cook until it was done, we took the entire stack off the pan.  We added okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, katsuobushi, and green onions.  As we added the katsuobushi on to the okonomiyaki, we could see the individual flakes shrivelling up due to the heat.

Between the layer of egg and crepe was soba noodles and cabbage.  We made others with different ingredients like cheese and bacon.  It was probably super fattening, but it tasted so good.  The sauce made it taste 10 times better.  I don’t know how Japanese mayonnaise is different from regular mayonnaise, but it’s definitely better.  We had enough ingredients to make 10 of them, so that each person could have two each.  As we kept cooking them, we got better and better at lifting the stack and flipping it.  The end product tasted so delicious and eating two of these filled me up real good.  I’m totally going to try and find a restaurant that makes these in Vancouver or if I’m feeling up for it, I can make it myself!