Hotel Dotonbori Namba

Hotel Dotonbori Namba

We got to Osaka at around 11:30pm.  We had been traveling for nearly 24 hours straight, having left Los Angeles on the morning of the 25th of March, arriving Tokyo Narita after an 11-hour flight on the 26th at 3pm, after which we hopped on a shinkansen and various subways that would get us to Osaka and into our hotel a few minutes shy of midnight.  Not that it was all that terrible… it was fun navigating the various transportation systems, and everywhere we turned there was always someone who kindly assisted when we had questions.  We had slept a little on the flight, and snoozed/ dozed on the shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka.  By the time we emerged from the Namba subway, and saw the huge Namba Hips amusement center looming in the dark, the sense of excitement kept growing.  We walked around the corner to our street, directly the Dotobori itself, looking for the hotel’s trademark 4 statues, named “Asian, African, Arabian, Western”  and which, according to the hotel website, “…created with a desire to welcome guests from all over the world…” The Hotel Dotonbori Namba has got to be one of the best budget hotels in Osaka.

To tell the truth I was a little apprehensive about it – I had read a little about the “semi-double” designation for Japanese hotel rooms and feared that the space (advertised as 13 square meters, or 140 square feet) and 140cm x 195cm bed (4.6 ‘ x 6.4’ ) would be indeed too tiny.  I needn’t have worried about anything.  The hotel room and bed was small, but it fit us just fine.  In short (heh), it was a small, nicely contained little space that had most everything we could have wanted, even a little refrigerator to keep drinks and small cold purchases that needed refrigeration.  There were 2 free bottles of water for us each day, but we ended up buying more from the Lawson kombini outside.  This tiny space was remarkably well arranged, and as we didn’t spend much time in it in any case, we barely noticed its size.

Our Room at the Hotel Dotonbori

We did have some problems with adjusting the thermostat – there were some limited English directions but for the most part we could not turn heat off.  The solution was to crack open our teeny window, through which we had a partial view of the city.  We particularly admired someone’s small rooftop garden (lower left-center in the photo below) from our vantage point.

View from our hotel room

 

The Bath – some folks don’t like these capsule bathrooms but I thought ours great! The tub is not a full tub, but has high enough sides to be able to stand as a small o-furo, or Japanese soaking tub if one wished.  Shampoo, Conditioner and Shower gel are provided; as were disposable toothbrushes and toothpaste, hairbrushes, razors with shaving cream, q-tips, and lotions and face wash for women.  And of course, the smart electronic loos, or “washlets” – it automatically played the sound of flushing water when one perched upon it, and we could always keep seat was always comfortably warm, sometimes a bit too warm as the weather improved.

Bathroom with "Washlet"

Though the walls were thin, we were not much bothered by noise.   Slippers were provided – both disposable, takeaway slippers and standard slippers; yukatas were provided as well, which we ended up using as bathrobes.  There was one English channel – CNN World – on television.

 

Desk/ cubby – again, small, but efficiently and cleverly arranged, with excellent use of small spaces.  There was even a small little device that allowed you to charge 4-5 different mobile phones, and already connected so you didn’t have to search for an outlet.  There was wired internet access in the room and we created a wireless hub by bringing an Airport Express and that worked really well for us.  I tended to work on the laptop at the desk and DD was ok with using his iPad and iPhone while lounging on the bed.

Desk plus mirrow and shelving and refrigerator

 

Bed and pillow – excellent – firm and very comfortable.  The hotel uses Serta mattresses, and provided  two kinds of excellent pillows: tempurpedic memory foam and one stuffed with corma beans (evokes traditional Japanese buckwheat pillows).  The bed was pushed up right next to the wall, so I had to make my way over DD if I needed to get up at night, but we didn’t mind this at all.

Laundry and Vending Machines, 2nd Floor

 

Other amenities – There is a paid coin laundry available for use in the vending machine room, free laptop rental, and 2 free Internet-wired PCs in the lobby.  Apparently we might have been able to make a short,  free international call or two in the lobby as well, but we didn’t need to and relied on email to communicate with friends and family.  The hotel also advertises free bicycle and DVD rental, and there’s an honor-system lending library in the vending room, with books entirely in Japanese, of course.

Assistance – There were always staff at the front desk, no matter what time of the day.  Old fogies that we were, we didn’t make it out past 3am on any given night, but it was nice to see at least someone at the front when we shuffled in, bleary-eyed, in the wee hours.  The staff were also very friendly and helpful.  They spoke and understood excellent English, and took great pains with trying to help us out with activating a sim card we had purchased for DD’s iphone.   We didn’t sample breakfast, which was available for about ¥900/ meal (or around $10); ¥800 if you make a reservation the day before.

Location – we could not have asked for better! It was a 3 minute trot from the Namba subway and just steps (across the street) from the Dotonbori, known for being an entertainment center in Osaka and is associated with the term Kuidaore – “to eat yourself into rack and ruin” … very apropos for DD and I.   We sampled tons of takoyaki, with stands or stalls or giant restaurants every few feet up and down the DT, as Istarted to call it after a day or so…We traversed through the huge connected shopping arcades of Shinsaibashi and Ebisubashi every day, moving through hordes of young people, many clad in dark-blazered school uniforms.  We noticed specifically that there were very few western faces in the crowd, and DD, with his 6″ tall lankiness, was able to gaze above them all.  He was particularly surprised one day to bump into a similarly tall blue-eyed gaijin, with face mask, who murmured “sumimasen,” before moving on.  And although we were truly centrally close, we never had any problems with crowd or street noise, no matter how much we kept the window open at night as we were on a section of the DT reasonably set apart from the all the craziness.

Price – The hotel website advertises a semi-double for under ¥10,000 a night.  We booked through Rakuten and ended up with a great rate.  We’re not exactly hostellers or backpackers, but didn’t want to shell out over ¥20000/ night for lodgings.  4 nights for came out to be ¥33500 total ($415), not including $6 worth of local phone calls we’d made.

More photos of the hotel on my Flickr set.

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