Passport - TB Townhouse

We landed at Kansai Airport at night and took a train to the city:



"Osaka was in darkness as we whistled by seeming only to be an endless sprawl of streetlights and neon. I looked at the people waiting at the stations we passed. They looked reassuringly human: tired after a days work and wanting to go home."



The first place we lived in Osaka was apartment 305 in TB Townhouse. I don't know what the Japanese designer of TB Townhouse thought TB stood for but it was a building that I would describe as being lung red in colour. Maybe it had been built originally to house the consumptive. We lived there for three years and I never saw a single neighbour.



My first letter home says:



"I think our apartment is big by Japanese standards. When I stand in the middle of our bathroom you can touch all four walls and the ceiling without stretching."



The badly blurred photo (above) gives you a summary of urban Osaka: bicycles, drink machines, and rubbish.


We had the good fortune to live around the corner from this tea room (left). As with TB Townhouse's designer I often wondered what the rather sour-faced owners of this little tea room thought Boob meant.


There must be about ten million of these little tea rooms across Japan and if I was going to suggest one thing to a visitor to Japan it would be to go to as many as these tea rooms as you can. Although each one serves an identical selection of food and drinks each one would have its own quirks reflecting the quiet eccentricity of the supposedly uniform Japanese.


There's a rather nice tea room in Koyasan filled with mounted and stuffed animals. Adds an interesting angle to the iced tea and cake.