Osaka makes the ideal gateway to our Japanese adventure

Showy modern architecture stretching to the horizon. More shopping malls than it seems any population can support, many in bewildering underground labyrinths. A profusion of bustling areas for dining out. A surprising fascination with the Missouri-born mascot of St. Louis University's sports teams. And a cheerful, friendly, fiercely independent people who never miss a chance to tell you they're nothing like the rest of the Japanese ... especially those dull people in Tokyo.

That's what I'll take away from Osaka.

We found this an ideal place to start our exploration of Japan. Though it's the country's second-largest city and sprawls expansively from its port, the main tourist sites are in a tight bundle along an easy-to-use subway (tube) system. The Osakans live up to their reputation for hospitality; this was one of the first cities to fully open to the West and has always been full of merchants with eyes open to possibilities.

We flew in to Osaka's Kansai International airport and took the train to the main station; our destination the Ibis Osaka Umeda Hotel nearby. I'd braced myself for culture shock on arrival in Asia for my first time. It wasn't too bad in the airport, with plenty of signage in Latin script and the familiarity of international travel hubs. The foreign feeling escalated a bit in Osaka's main station, with crowds that made London Waterloo's rush hour look small. It's always tough to be a tourist, trying to figure out where you're going, as thousands of busy commuters rush past you in patterns you haven't figured out yet. The toughest bit, however ... on the first day and for most of our visit ... was navigating the short distance (perhaps 200 metres as the crow flies) from station to hotel.

Osaka, a local guide explained, is punishingly hot and humid in the summer. Winters are bitterly cold. (The first of many parallels I drew to the American midwest.) Savvy locals get from point to point in vast, temperature-controlled shopping malls or networks of elevated passages. It's very easy to lose any sense of direction in the seemingly-endless, relatively featureless subterranean corridors. By day two we'd started to grow confident with the path from hotel to station,  navigating shop front by shop front. Then we returned after closing time when all the shutters were down, eliminating our visual cues. Our departure on our fourth day was probably the first time we navigated with confidence.

Osaka has a reputation as a party town, full of locals who love to eat and drink. There's even a word specifically associated with the place, kuidaore, that translates as "eating oneself to ruin." (The original proverb says you dress into ruin in Kyoto, and eat into ruin in Osaka.) The most famous place to do this is Dotonbori, an area jam-packed with restaurants and street food stalls on either side of the Tombori River, now strictly confined between embankments and used for tourist boats. This area is also famed for its showy signage, most frequently photographed from the Ebisu Bridge. Here, you get Osaka's version of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. This seemed an easy choice for our first evening, dazed with both culture shock and jet lag, and so it proved.

We approached down Shinsaibashi-Suji shopping street, 600 metres of covered, but thankfully above ground, local boutiques and international brands running into the famous bridge. On a Monday night in late September, crowds resembled the pre-Christmas rush on Oxford Street. Though there were plenty of Western tourists, the Japanese were out in force as well. The mass stroll gave the place an almost Italian feel of the passeggiata on a hot summer's night. Price checks on a few items in the shops suggest that costs are about the same as London, but you'll come out slightly ahead on major purchases because of getting the tax back.

We thought the most best area for eating would be the Tombori river walk, and we did wet our appetite with local beer and snacks at one riverside bar. How "foodie" is this city? The tiny, simple-looking place we settled on specialised in all things smoked, including some of the beer. Smoked cod roe on slices of crisp cucumber makes for a simple and tasty amuse bouche. But we found the action one street south much more thrilling on both the signage and the food fronts. This street is awash with three-dimensional, moving figures above the shopfronts. Bulls swing their tongues and roll their eyes. Crabs wave claws. Octopus writhe tentacles. The most famous snack on offer from the street stands here is takoyaki, a mix of batter and chopped octopus poured into a dimpled pan and turned with blinding speed and precision into fried balls. Basically, octopus donuts. They're delicious.

We wanted to sit down and take things slowly, however, so we opted for a popular sushi place called Daikisuisan. It's conveyor-belt style, which gave us a comforting postponement from the challenge of navigating a Japanese menu. But the real reason we went in was the enormous carcass of a blue fin tuna sitting on a bed of ice outside. We didn't understand his words, but the street hawker's gestures and the video above him made it clear that they'd purchased the fish this morning and its parts were now circling the conveyor belt in all its glorious variety.

In England we generally know two types of tuna: regular, and the fattier belly meat called "toro". Here, they have posters dissecting the body into various cuts, as you'd see for pork or beef in a British butcher.

These cuts circled the belt, along with spine slivers, cheeks, deep fried chunks ... plus other fish and tempura vegetables. (Tempura okra, it turns out, is fabulous.) We both tried o-toro, the most luxurious cut, almost raw-chicken-pink in its pale fattiness. Though an exquisite sensation, it was almost too much, and we both found we preferred the highest quality "akami" from the back. This fresh, the humbler cuts were better than anything at home. And the price was 10% to 20% cheaper.

Though all the guidebooks will point you to Dotonbori, I preferred Shinsekai. This area was originally developed in the early 20th century to look like New York and Paris, but after WW2, extensive development and a few decades of being Osaka's worst neighbourhood, it's lost that feel. Now it's the edgier, hipper cousin of Dotonbori, benefitting from recent urban regeneration. The main streets spread from the bottom of the Tsūtenkaku Tower and are jammed with restaurants, shops and pachinko parlours. Covered lanes leading away from here are jammed with the small, sit-at-the-bar style local places that I hope to have the nerve to try before the end of this trip. Shinsekai signage is as bright as Dotonbori but there's less neon and more three-dimensional figures. There's a particularly magnificent building covered with registers of banners painted with famous sumo wrestlers.

The most noticeable character here, however, is a pointy-headed genie-type creature called the billiken ... the "god of things as they ought to be".  Though he looks convincingly Japanese, St. Louisans will immediately identify him as a home-town boy, and a bit of research reveals that he was created in Missouri in the early 20th century as part of the same craze for cute that gave birth to the Teddy Bear and the Kewpie Doll. Though mostly forgotten in the United States, the billiken has endured and prospered in Japan, especially in Shinsekai. One of the greatest joys of wandering this area is spotting his different incarnations. He's dressed as a fisherman outside of a restaurant where you can catch your own fish, a wrestler in front of the sumo-themed place, a baseball player in front of a sports bar, etc.

Others make a pilgrimage to Shinsekai just for Tower Knives. Founder Bjorn Heiberg is testimony to the fact that sometimes it takes an outsider to discover a country's magic. Canadian-born, Danish-raised, he married a Japanese woman and discovered the unique properties of the local cooking knives. Soon he'd ditched his English-teaching job for knife sales and started promoting their quality around the world. His shop features blades from the best craftsmen from across the country; one of them is usually at work behind windows at the back. Even if you have no intention of buying, it's worth a visit to look at the beauty of the products on display.

Steel blades are strengthened by a folding process called "damascening". The smith creates layers in the steel much like pastry chefs do with dough and butter in the laminating process. A true artist can produce exquisite patterns on the blade, like ripples flowing across a pond. The examples on sale here are of a beauty I've only seen in museums before. A multi-national staff helps shoppers from all over the world, many of them professional chefs. The last thing my husband expected to be doing on our second day in Japan was chatting in Danish, but so it transpired, as the guy who helped us was a former Copenhagen chef so passionate about knives he moved to Japan to be at the heart of the trade. Tower also carries a range of garden tools and other bladed instruments. I'm going home with a much-prized pair of secateurs.

True to the spirit of kuidaore, the eating and drinking nightlife spots were our highlights of Osaka. Our best experience, in fact, was a cooking class in Shinsekai, which I'll cover in another entry. Osaka's other sights didn't inspire us as much.

We took a hop-on-hop-off bus tour from the station ... which is a tourist sight on its own from the modern architecture standpoint ... and were treated to lots of insights on the modern city by a local guide with fluent English. It was this day that crafted the first impressions I started this article with. I'm not sure I've ever visited another city with so many shopping districts cited as tourist attractions. You'll spot an occasional temple, and the rare pre-war building, but most of Osaka is broad, busy avenues lined with towers of glass, steel and stone. The most famous "old" attraction is towering Osaka Castle in the centre of an enormous park. But even this is modern; though the castle was incredibly important in Japan's 16th- and 17th-century wars of unification, what you see today is a concrete re-creation only finished in 1997.

Unlike the hideous urban sprawl we saw from the train on the way in, the modern architecture in the centre of town is often strikingly attractive. The northwest front of the train station complex is one of the best examples, with its grand, almost ceremonial stairs and enormous atriums looking over a plaza of fountains and a complex of dark glass buildings dedicated to tech startups. Unsurprisingly, the immediate area is full of coffee shops and hip bars jammed with affluent, creative-looking 20- and 30-somethings.

In its architecture, its commercial sensibilities and its people's love of fun, Osaka reminded me strongly of Chicago.

It's also a great hopping off point for sightseeing across the central plain, or Kansai Region, of Japan. You can easily take in Kobe, Himeji, Kyoto and Nara from here with fast, clean and efficient trains. We only did the first two before moving on to Kyoto. About them, more to come...