Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan and a Shrine Facade

This will be a short post because I spent most of this afternoon in Osaka at only one attraction: the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to call it just the Osaka Aquarium from here on in, except in the subheading below.

By the time I was finished there, I just barely had time to look at the facade of a shrine not far from my hotel before it closed. (The temple, not my hotel, closed. Fortunately, my hotel was still open. All of my stuff was there.)

Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan

I’ve probably seen my share of aquariums during my travels. The Osaka Aquarium is one of the better ones.

The aquarium is close to Osaka Bay. I was able to catch just a glimpse of the bay. The little smidgen of it that I saw looked like an industrial port. So, this section of this post is entirely about the aquarium.

My walking tour app says that when the Osaka Aquarium opened in 1990, it was then the largest in the world. It’s since been surpassed, but that doesn’t make it any less huge. And it’s spectacular.

After passing through the “Aqua Gate,” a tunnel with fish tanks on either side of it, a long escalator takes you up the equivalent of seven stories.

The path through the Osaka Aquarium wends its way around the aquarium, past myriad tanks. For amphibious creatures, such as otters, sea lions, and penguins, you get to see them up top, above the water. Then, as you walk down ramps to the lower level, you get to see them swimming around underwater when you later pass by the lower level of that tank.

There was one tank which was all viewable on one level, but there was a large rock outcropping rising above the water. Fish swam in the water, while land creatures, South American coati, scampered around on the rocks.

The Osaka Aquarium divides its space into different geographic regions of the world. I’m going from the aquarium’s website here, because there’s no way I’d remember them all. The sections are the Japan Forest, Monterey Bay, Gulf of Panama, Ecuador Rainforest, Antarctica, Tasman Sea, Great Barrier Reef, Pacific Ocean, Seto Inland Sea, Coast of Chile, Cook Straight, Japan Deep, Jellyfish, and Arctic Region.

There was also a seasonal exhibit that included bigfin reef squid.

In addition, there’s a section where they display solely cute, small creatures. There were some spotted garden eels among the fish there. I first saw garden eels at the Sumida Aquarium in Tokyo a week and a half ago in Tokyo. They’re amazing creatures that look like underwater worms that anchor their tail ends into sand, but stand with curved upright bodies in the water that rarely move more than a slight wriggle. Today, I saw one of them pull itself almost completely under the sand, leaving just its eyes and the tip of its head (if the top of an eel can rightly be called a head) exposed above the sand.

That sounds like a lot to cram into one aquarium, but, as I said, it’s huge. Some of the tanks were quite large.

And the Osaka Aquarium normally displays a little more. One section, the Aleutian Islands exhibit, was closed for renovations when I was there.

You might have noticed that I mentioned jellyfish above. That probably struck fear into the hearts of regular readers. “Oh, no! Joel’s going to gush about jellyfish again, isn’t he? I know he is! I have to run away quickly! I don’t want to be subjected to that nonsense yet again. Not now! Not ever!”

Jeez, people. I didn’t know that listening to me gush about jellyfish had become so repugnant to you due to my repetition. Suffice it to say that I was getting worried. I started to have heart palpitations. They left the jellyfish until near the end, and I began to fear that they didn’t have any. But they came through with several jellyfish tanks, including a couple of varieties that I don’t recall seeing in any aquariums before. They’re such magnif… Nope. I wasn’t going to do that. Sorry.

I serendipitously came upon a few tanks during feeding time. It happened with penguins, sea lions, and one other creature, I forget which. You might think, “That’s perfect. The animals will congregate in one place and stand relatively still while being fed. That must have made it much easier to take a picture than when they were swimming quickly in the water or scurrying rapidly on the land.”

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The problem is, what congregated in even greater numbers than the animals being fed were the people on our side of the glass, gathering to watch the goings on. I don’t know if some people got lucky, arrived just at the start of the feeding, and got a front row place to stand as a result. Or perhaps some people knew the feeding times at each tank that had feedings (not all tanks had public feedings) and made a point of getting there early. Or probably some of each.

(There were signs at some of the exhibits listing the feeding times at that specific tank, but I didn’t see the signs until I got to the tanks. So I couldn’t do any planning in that regard. If there is a central list of all of the feeding times, I missed it.)

The point is, whenever I got to an exhibit where there was a feeding going on, there was always a crowd already standing there blocking my view when I arrived. It’s a good thing I’m still in reasonably good shape for a man my age. It wasn’t easy pushing them out of the way.

I spent more than two and a half hours in the Osaka Aquarium and never got bored.

Namba Yasaka Shrine

It took me two subway lines, three stops on one and four on the other, plus about 20 minutes of walking to get to Namba Yasaka Shrine from the Osaka Aquarium. I chose it because there was nothing I was interested in close to the aquarium, and the shrine is less than a 20-minute walk from my hotel. I arrived at the shrine just four minutes before they closed the gates to the compound.

I knew the closing time before I left the aquarium. And Google Maps told me I’d arrive only three minutes before closing. But I figured that was when they closed the doors to the shrine building. Because I was interested in only looking at the facade, I assumed I’d be able to do that even with the doors closed.

Had I known that there was a compound with a gate that gets closed, shutting off the building from view, I wouldn’t have gone. If I made any errors on the route, or if a subway was delayed, or if I caught more red crossing lights while walking than Google thought I would, I would have missed it.

But I made it. Several other people also cut it close. And some got shut out when the gates were closed just after they arrived.

But I made it. I don’t even know if I, a tourist, would be allowed inside the shrine at any time, but I got to see what I came for: the facade.

The facade is a giant lion’s head. It is a stylized lion, like one you’d see in an illustrated Japanese legend. The door to the shrine is through the lion’s wide-open mouth.

So, that’s as quirky as heck.

And that’s the end of my day.