Mystery remains over Twiggy’s choice of eaterie and shame about the octopus dumplings

OSAKA. Only 12 minutes away from Kobe by the hallowed bullet train and last Thursday I was in Japan’s thirdbiggest city, catching up with a couple of fellow journalists who were billeted there for Scotland’s twoweek stay in Japan’s Hyogo region.

Instantly, I sensed Osaka was the Glasgow to Kobe’s Edinburgh. Bright, brassy, brash and a bit rough around the edges in relative Japanese terms. Osaka, I realised, was my kind of town.

My regret is that I never got to try octopus dumplings, said to be the street food delicacy that makes Osaka worth visiting, but there was no room left after a fine feed at a restaurant in the city’s famed neondazzling Dotonbori district.

Aplace that seemed to be offering an edible menu at a reasonable price got the thumbs up. We even glossed over the starter option of “crab innards salad”.

As ever, the place was what Fry & Laurie in the old Alliance & Leicester ads would call “compact and bijou” and it seemed full, but the waitress whisked us up a steep set of stairs to what must have been the attic where a spare table awaited.

The walls were decorated with pictures as you often find in restaurants of famous people who have dined there. There were a lot of baseballers, and wrestlers (not sumo; they’d never have fitted in the place) but the photo that caught our eye was one of what was undeniably our very own Swinging Sixties icon Twiggy.

I asked the waitress if Twiggy, pictured left, had really eaten in this restaurant but she was flummoxed. The poor millennial girl with admirable but basic English, had been consigned to the attic with a bunch of westerners, was now being asked about a British model whose fame peak spiked more than 30 years before she was born and, understandably, it was simply too much for her to bear.

So the mystery of whether I ate in the same Osaka restaurant as Twiggy remains just that. I’m sure she would have enjoyed the salad.

KYOTO. On Friday I made the most of the Japan Rail Pass and headed to the country’s sacred ancient capital, only half an hour away on the drool-inducingly magnificent Shinkansen bullet train.

I enjoyed a whistlestop tour of some glorious temples, a now very modern city of 1.5 million, with one of the most impressive, futuristic railway stations I’ve ever seen.

On the way back to Kobe my bullet train, shock horror, actually broke down at Osaka. I was crestfallen. It was like when one of your childhood heroes shows themself to have some kind of human weakness and you feel the glitter has gone forever, never to be reattached. Turned out it was a minor fault, everybody got off and there was another train waiting on the opposite platform and we were moving again in two minutes.

Train travel in Japan is an absolute dream. It’s a bit pointless and boring to bang on with the “why can’t we do this in Britain?” spiel. The fact is we are simply not capable of providing this kind of transport efficiency, never have been and never will, we just need to accept that. Our pop music and TV is better than Japan’s, of that you can be well assured. Every country has its ying and yang points.