Tsuruhashi is Koreatown
Exploring the Hub of Osaka's Korean Community
Tsuruhashi in Osaka is Japan's largest Koreatown where kimchi is produced by the barrel and you can sidestep Japanese ettiquette.
Arriving in Tsuruhashi by train the first thing that hits you as the doors open is the smell of spicy barbecued food – this is yaki niku or ‘Korean barbecue’ but you're not in Korea, you're in Japan because Tsuruhashi is Osaka’s Korea Town.
Serving the Kintetsu-Nara and JR train lines the platforms of Tsuruhashi Station form a kind of roof on a subterranean world of markets and food stalls below. Most of these are run by Japanese-Koreans, known as Zainichi, or recent Korean immigrants to Osaka. Here they sell a range of delicious Korean street foods such as kimbop – a kind of Korean sushi roll and a pancake flavoured with leeks called chijimi as well as the ubiquitous kimchi which Koreans eat as a side dish with any meal.
Kimchi itself is a staple of Korean cuisine and perhaps its most famous export. Stray not too far from the lively area around the station and you are certain to come across a tiny kimchi factory where women are slicing Chinese cabbage and liberally flavouring it with brine, garlic, scallions and chilli. Once prepared, the kimchi is then left in sealed containers to ferment for anything from a few days to a number of years. So great is the production of kimchi to meet the area’s demands that men can be seen at any time of the day or night wheeling about giant plastic vats of the stuff on trolleys.
As Korean food is far spicier than the rather more sedate Japanese cuisine, so Tsuruhashi has a liveliness not often seen elsewhere in Osaka. Here one can bargain for goods in the small clothes shops that spill out into the narrow alleyways, often a forbidden practice elsewhere in Japan.
Tens of thousands of Koreans were brought to Japan as a form of cheap labour during its occupation of the peninsular. While many Koreans are third generation, the term Zainichi means ‘staying in Japan’, suggesting a status in the country that is far from permanent. Despite this uneasy relationship with the state, Tsuruhashi preserves many aspects of traditional Japanese life in its narrow streets and tiny wooden and corrugated homes. It is at once the spice to Osaka life and a testimony to its disappearing past.
