Taro Kobayashi– Author –

Ever been in a conversation in Osaka and felt like you missed a beat? One moment you’re chatting, the next your friend is dramatically pointing out a tiny flaw in your story, or a shopkeeper is heckling you with a grin. It’s fast, it’s s...

Welcome to Osaka, a city that moves to a different beat. You feel it the moment you step off the Shinkansen from Tokyo. The escalators are on the right, the chatter is a little louder, and the air crackles with a kind of raw, unfiltered ...

You’ve seen the pictures. You might have even been there. The Glico Running Man, a symbol of endless energy, posing high above a canal bursting with neon. Giant mechanical crabs and pufferfish cling to buildings, their colors reflecting ...

Ever been in a new city, feeling like a ghost? You walk the streets, you ride the trains, you buy the coffee, but you’re invisible. You exist within the city, but you’re not of it. In many places, especially in a country like Japan known...

You’re standing in the aisle of a Life supermarket, staring at a wall of soy sauce bottles. Light, dark, tamari, dashi-infused—the choices are overwhelming. You look confused, and you are. Before you can even pull out your phone to ask a...

Ask anyone in Japan about Kishiwada, and you’ll get a one-word answer: Danjiri. It’s a name that conjures images of pure, unadulterated chaos. Massive, intricately carved wooden floats, weighing up to four tons, careening around tight co...

Someone from Tokyo once asked me, “Where do you go to see the real Osaka?” They were expecting me to say Dotonbori, with its giant crab signs and seas of tourists, or maybe the towering Osaka Castle. I just smiled and said, “You don't go...

You see them everywhere in Osaka. A flash of leopard print cutting through the crowd on a mamachari bicycle, its front basket overflowing with daikon radish and green onions. A booming voice, thick with the local Kansai dialect, haggling...

Step off the train at Umeda Station for the first time, and you’re not just in a station; you’re inside a living organism. It’s a concrete and steel circulatory system, pulsing with a relentless flow of people. You’re carried along by th...

So you're thinking about living in Osaka. You've heard the talk, the classic showdown, the eternal question that gets thrown at every newcomer: "Are you a Kita person or a Minami person?" It’s the city’s shorthand, a quick way to sort pe...

Spend a Saturday afternoon in Osaka, really sink into it. Stand in the middle of Shinsaibashi, and just listen. It’s a wall of sound. The clatter of pachinko parlors, the overlapping jingles from a dozen drugstores, the shouts of shop st...

I saw it for the first time when I was a kid, trailing behind my grandmother in the humid afternoon buzz of the Kuromon Ichiba Market. She was inspecting a row of gleaming horse mackerel, their silver skins catching the fluorescent light...