Oh, Tamade. To think we gave up the thrill of your streets for this retirement commune on Awaji…
Every Osaka lover owes it to him/herself to go visit the police stations around Nishinari/Sumiyoshi. I shit you not, the buildings are barricaded against attack from the outside. The area around the Sumiyoshi police station, especially, is what I imagine Japan looked like right after the war, complete with streets filled with mangy dogs, scary vagrants, and rusty piles of junk. OK, maybe the strays are a bit inauthentic (read: “four-legged protein source,” if they had even lasted that long, or even existed in the first place for that matter) for post-war Japan, but you get the picture.