Population Density

(Big Danger in Little Osaka #22, 2009)

What continues to astound me on a daily basis is just how ridiculously dense Osaka is. The sheer amount of people and things packed into a relatively small area is phenomenal. Osaka prefecture is the second smallest in Japan, and yet it has the third largest population. The population density of Osaka city itself is about 12,000 people per square kilometre, roughly ten times that of Auckland. Within a two-block radius of where I live there are dozens of apartment buildings, houses, businesses, a few factories, a hairdressers’, several bars, a café, a supermarket, two convenience stores, a park and an elementary school. And this is a fairly sleepy area of a generally unremarkable part of the city. I often go for wanders through the narrow, maze-like streets around my apartment and discover things like an ancient shrine nestled between multi-storey apartment blocks, or yet another school hidden behind a motorway. A few times I’ve stumbled across a huge mansion that looks as if it’s been uprooted from more glamorous surroundings and unceremoniously dumped in the middle of an industrial area, overlooking a power station.

Ten minutes on the train takes me to Namba (not be confused with NAMBLA), the entertainment hub of Osaka. Namba has to have the highest pleasure-per-square-metre density in the world: the place is crammed with places to eat, drink and be seedy, animated neon signs and gigantic TV screens, an endless sea of people dressed in all kinds of bizarre shit, and vending machines that dispense almost anything you might need, including cigarettes, alcohol and, yes, pornography. Everything is so densely packed in it’s hard to know where to start: one multi-storey building can house around twenty different bars, cafes and live music venues.

To some, this may sound like a decadent, claustrophobic nightmare, but somehow Osaka makes it work. Historically, Osaka was the merchant centre of Japan, and you can see the influence today in the way shopkeepers loudly and enthusiastically interact with customers. In general, Osakans have a reputation as being warm and friendly people, and are often contrasted with the cold and business-like Tokyoites. (I once heard the vocalist of a Tokyo-based band say that they love playing in Osaka, because the people actually, y’know, move and make noise and shit.) There is a real warmth to Osaka that allows so many people to live together in close quarters without going insane.

Part of the reason why Osaka (and other Japanese cities) is so densely populated is because a huge chunk of Japan is mountainous and uninhabitable. While some picture Japan as a vast concrete jungle, most of the country is actually fairly unspoiled. Lush forests, ancient temples and even wild monkeys are less than an hour away from the centre of Osaka by train. Even in the heart of the city there are some decent parks and rivers. Sure, the place could do with a few more trees, but it’s not nearly as bad as some might think. If I need something slightly more peaceful and serene after too many nights having my head exploded by the audiovisual overload that is downtown Osaka, it’s never that far away.