Osaka Unmasked
Culture Society Guide to Japan- English
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Mesmerizing Chinese Tourists
Recently, on one of my regular radio gigs, we talked about why Osaka, especially its Minami district, is so popular with overseas visitors, and Chinese in particular. What makes Osaka so interesting and where do visitors gravitate? I asked two Chinese friends: one first moved to Japan with his parents in the 1980s, studied in Kobe, and now does business in Osaka and Shanghai; the other has operated a website for Chinese visitors to Osaka since the 1990s.
Their answer was simple: Minami, in particular, Dōtonbori and Kuromon Ichiba (the Kuromon market). The streets here are packed with eateries and other tiny shops. It’s the open-air atmosphere of these businesses that is so appealing.
One point they mentioned stood out in particular. Over the past 20 years, China’s major cities have undergone rapid modernization, with an increase in giant shopping malls and food courts housed in high-rise buildings. For Chinese consumers who have grown accustomed to such large-scale retail facilities, the casual atmosphere of Osaka’s commercial districts and its markets are a refreshing change. For those aged in their fifties or older who grew up in the metropolis of Shanghai in particular, shops where you can poke your nose in to browse or snack are a trip down memory lane.
The Kuromon market, which caters to professional chefs, attracts overseas tourists seeking top-grade fresh seafood. The area is enjoying a recent surge in tourists from China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. (© Kō Hiroki)
Downtown Shanghai has undergone radical transformation. Until around a decade ago, it was renowned for eateries serving noodle soup, rice porridge, and baozi or other dumplings. Development, though, has replaced the ramshackle streetscape with immaculate high-rise buildings.
A District is Well-Suited to Ambling
People often comment that the commercial districts make Osaka what it is.
Yet it’s hard to describe one “typical” Osaka shopping street. The districts include Shinsaibashi-suji, lined with department stores and fashion houses; the Dōtonbori canal district, home to the famed Kuidaore Tarō mannequin and decorated with giant billboards for crab, puffer fish, and octopus restaurants; and Nanba’s Sennichi Mae, a street of cooking utensil vendors, selling pots, knives, and everything you would need to open your own takoyaki stall, right down to lanterns and banners.
The Kuromon market, popular with Chinese tourists, is packed with fishmongers. In the past, it catered exclusively to local chefs from establishments both grand and humble.
The Kuromon market, with some 170 shops, styles itself as “The Greatest Kitchen on Earth.” (© Kuroiwa Masakazu)
The market’s layout has no rhyme or reason. A vendor specializing in tuna sits alongside a diner. Just down the street, a fruit and cakes shop is next door to a processed meat butcher. The shopping experience here is nothing like the clearly defined aisles of a supermarket.
The Chinese tourists who come here are often looking for seafood, particularly tuna, prawns, and shellfish. China’s wealthy elite are gourmands, and within their circles, word spreads with astonishing speed. They all know they can readily enjoy tuna belly sushi, grilled shrimp on skewers, or even puffer fish hot pot at Kuromon. Not only is the food cheaper and tastier than that available in the brightly lit Kita Shinchi or Higashi Shinsaibashi areas, because Kuromon is a market where even the restaurants come to source their ingredients, it also tends to be fresher. These visitors are savvy travelers when it comes to value for money.
A Chinese couple tries fugu (puffer fish) sashimi while standing outside of Minami, a fugu restaurant in Osaka’s Kuromon market. (© Kō Hiroki)
Professional chefs from all kinds of restaurants come here to get their fugu from Minami, a long-established shop that now serves hot pot outside, with customers seated on camp stools at a folding table. I’ve been coming here for 30 years, during which I have become friends with the owner. One day he suggested, in true Osaka style, that I try the soup stock. Apparently, some 10 years ago, Chinese tourists started asking to eat fugu on the spot, and the shop saw it as an opportunity. Today the fish is served with the conventional ponzu (soy and citrus sauce), the standard Japanese style, as well as in the store’s original Chinese-style soup.
The fugu store Minami has tailored a soup dish to the tastes of Chinese tourists. Japanese generally dip thin slices of fugu in boiling water and dip it into ponzu. For its Chinese customers, who are unaccustomed to this taste, the shop developed a dashi stock to match the fish. For an established restaurant to experiment like this is quintessentially Osakan. (© Kō Hiroki)
Elsewhere in Kuromon, a tuna vendor serves sushi to customers seated on benches, and shrimp and shellfish shops cook their produce in the open to lure tourists.
For many years, specialty chefs from renowned restaurants have come to this market for their produce, but now, they are joined by wealthy Chinese tourists who savor the wares on the spot, creating an almost surreal scene. This epitomizes the “anything goes” nature of Osaka Minami. The adaptability and service-mindedness of merchants born and bred in Minami’s markets reveal the true nature of Osaka.
The pleasure of the Kuromon market and Osaka’s other retail districts is best experienced through a leisurely stroll. Each street and area has its own flavor and unique local character.
For a local like me, visiting favorite shops offers a pleasure akin to dropping in on old friends. For overseas visitors, it is more like an amusement park—but one with no admission charge, offering incomparable wonder and discovery.
