Osaka Museum of History – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

The main sight I visited this afternoon in Osaka was the Osaka Museum of History. Before that I visited a temple. And I ended the afternoon at a shrine.

I’ll take those in order here and make quick work of this post

Hōzen-ji Temple

The Hōzen-ji Temple, built in 1637, is hidden behind some buildings in a hardscrabble, low-rise neighbourhood where hole-in-the-wall restaurants occupy the street level of most of the buildings.

It’s an uncrowded, small, workday temple. Uncrowded though it was, a slow, steady trickle of people came by to worship. Fewer people, maybe just me, dropped by to gawk. I found it on my walking tour app. I guess the app doesn’t have a huge audience.

Hōzen-ji has a moss-covered statue of Fudo Myoo. Sorry, I didn’t get a picture of it. The reason Fudo Myoo is moss-covered is that the custom is to splash water on it for good luck. I don’t know if it brought anyone good luck, but it brought the statue moss. So, there’s that.

A small lane with small shops and restaurants runs through and jogs around Hōzen-ji Temple. My walking tour app tells me that the lane evokes the atmosphere of Osaka as it was centuries ago. I wasn’t in Osaka centuries ago. I only look that old. I’ll have to take the app’s word for it.

Osaka Museum of History

Ironically, the Osaka Museum of History is not in a historical building. It’s in a modern—and modern-looking—building with a curved front facade built of patterned beige brick. Or maybe it’s the back facade. I can’t tell. There are entry doors on both of what I’d call the sides of the buildings.

The other end, the front or back, as the case may be, is transparent glass.

You could see better what I mean in the picture of the building that I forgot to take. You can probably find one on the web. Sorry about that. I forgot to take a few pictures today. Because of that, I reduced the price of viewing this page by half. (Of course, in the exceptionally unlikely event that I should at some point put up a paywall and start to charge a fee to view these pages, I will rescind that half-price offer and charge full price for this page.)

The entrance to the museum is on the ground floor of the building. The exhibit space is on the tenth through the seventh floors. Don’t ask me what’s on the second through sixth floors.

And, no, “tenth through the seventh” rather than “seventh through tenth” is not a typo. The entry staff insist that you take an elevator up to the tenth floor. You then traipse through the floors from the top down. Once you get to the seventh floor, you take an elevator back down to the ground floor.

The floors are not tiny, but they’re not huge either. So it doesn’t take an enormous amount of time to go through the museum.

I didn’t get as much out of the Osaka Museum of History, or spend as much time there, as I might have if I spoke or, more importantly, read Japanese.

After getting off the elevator on the tenth floor, I walked into a room that looped through a three-minute video. It used illustrations to show the development of Osaka and some critical events that occurred there, starting very briefly from a few millennia ago (just empty land) up to more modern times. From the time when photography became available, the video switched from illustrations to photographs.

Language wasn’t a problem in this video. The soundtrack was entirely instrumental. The only words that appeared on the screen simply said what period was represented or what event was illustrated. It was just headlines, and those headlines appeared in both Japanese and English.

It’s after that when I didn’t get as much out of the Osaka Museum of History as someone who could read Japanese.

Beyond the video, the exhibits were in chronological order, with the oldest at the top of the museum and the most current on the seventh floor.

The artifacts on display varied depending on the period. For the ancient period, there were archaeological finds such as old pottery and architectural elements. For the more recent periods, there were models of towns and old buildings, a pageant float that was used from 1789 to 1801. For the most recent period represented, mannequins were undertaking everyday activities in, I think, the early 20th century.

Fair enough as far as it goes, but to make sense of it all, you had to read the related text. It was inconsistent in its use of English.

Some signs had paragraphs of text that appeared in three languages. I know one was English, because I can read English. I assume one of the others was Japanese. I have no idea what the other was, but it used the same sort of complex characters as Japanese and Chinese. I read somewhere that there are two different Japanese scripts. Maybe they were the two different types of Japanese scripts. I don’t know

Those signs were grand. I think I got as much information as someone who reads Japanese. (But how would I know?)

However, some information panels had considerable, single-language, Japanese text, and just a headline in English. For example, above a lengthy Japanese narrative, there’d be, in English, something like, “Model of such-and-such.” And that would be it.

Usually, the placards by individual artifacts were like that. There’d be a brief paragraph of Japanese text, but in English, there’d be just the headline saying succinctly what the item is, not any further information about it.

And some signs had only Japanese.

At the ticket booth, before buying my ticket, I asked the ticket seller if there was English in the museum. He answered, “Yes, English.” And then he proceeded to tell me, in English, about starting on the top floor and then going down, and that I can’t take flash photographs. I think he thought I was asking him to give me that information in English, not about whether there was English signage in the museum.

This is Japan. The language here is Japanese. People here should be proud of that and celebrate that. If they don’t want to provide full English at some attractions, I’m good with that. Just let me know..

To be fair, there’s plenty of English where it counts in the cities and the town (Hakone) I’ve visited so far in Japan, such as station names on the subway. And other tourist attractions I’ve been to here have given English almost equal billing to Japanese.

It’s just that I’m mollycoddled when it comes to language in my travels. Justified or not, English is now the lingua franca of tourism. As an anglophone, that gives me an advantage that I haven’t earned, but that I’ve come to expect. I don’t want to come across as spoiled or expecting privilege, but I guess I am and do. I’m not proud of that. But it certainly (usually) makes travelling easier and more enjoyable for me.

Tamatsukuri Inari Shrine

Tamatsukuri Inari Shrine is a nice, almost cute, little Shinto shrine. It’s dedicated to the deity Inari.

The shrine is believed to have been founded in 12 BCE. What’s standing today is not the original shrine. That was destroyed by fires and wars, and then completely demolished by bombing in the Second World War. The current shrine was built in 1954 with contributions from worshippers.

There’s a large statue on the grounds of the shrine. A sign beside the statue, with both Japanese and English text, says that it’s a statue of Toyotomi Hideyori, who was born in 1593, the son of a feudal lord.

Okay. I’m getting tired. That’s enough for today.

Catch you tomorrow. (That is, of course, a figure of speech. I am not capable of catching anyone, nor would it be proper.)