As you probably already know, the first night I stayed in a capsule hotel. This is a picture of one of the rooms I passed through to get to mine. I don't think there are people in there, I think those rooms were being used as incubators or cleaned or something...It's a little bit creepy.
On that Sunday I went to see Osaka Castle, which is in the middle of a lot of beautiful park-like land that is in the midst of the city. The castle is now a museum with information about its history and that of Osaka and the broader culture on every floor. Sadly, there are no rooms being shown as they once were. I had really been hoping the interior would have been maintained in the style of its original occupiers.
While at the castle there were a series of performances. I believe they were celebrating the auspiciousness of the date. Traditionally, in Japan and probably other Asian nations, various numbers and dates have differing degrees of auspiciousness. So the number four is bad in Japanese because its alternate pronunciation, "shi", also means death. Thusly, the number is bad luck. Five, however, is very lucky. Only the five and fifty yen coins have holes in the middle - you can put them on strings and wear them! I don't know if that is traditional but I have had a five yen coin on a chain for luck for seven years now. Calendar dates also have fortune-related features and I saw signs for the numbers three, five and seven posted for the celebration.
The performances were many and varied. Some appeared to be traditional group dances while some were modern. In particular a number of teenage Japanese did a rap-esque hip-hop dance that started with all of them wearing hoods over their heads and processing like monks onto the stage. When the hoods were removed you saw that the girls all had corn rows.
Tennoji is a temple in Osaka that apparently has some strong connection to turtles ("Tennoji" doesn't mean turtle). The pond in the middle act as home to a large number of basking turtles and in one of the buildings there was a fountain where the water poured out of an enormous stone turtle's mouth. I watched a monk (or member of the temple staff?) use a long stick to prod a number of prayer sheets a woman had bought into the water. I don't know why. If I had to guess I would say that she bought the prayers for some particular event or person or as a general devotion and that the way in which the prayers are sent into the next world is by their destruction.
