This is my friend, Bangly’s posting
[April, 2013] I don’t have enough experience to evaluate the different characters of Japanese people depending on where they are from, but soon after I went out of the Osaka station I perceived a different atmosphere from Tokyo.
People, by instinct, gave me the impressions to be more uninhibited.
First, I noticed that on the escalators they give the left side to pass instead of the right side, opposite of Tokyo and all the others cities that I visited, so that they show that they are different.
Furthermore, outside of a restaurant a waitress girl approached me to talk a bit.
And in the end she “gave me five” and told her collegues “we became friends”.
Anything like this has never happened to me here in Japan before.
My impressions were confirmed from my guide/friend, Okazawa-san.
When I told him about this incident, he said to me “people from Osaka are like Napolitans whereas people from Tokyo are like Milaneses!”.
It was very funny.
Obviously generalization is always not appropriate, but if I think how much they are noisy and convivial during the meal or how much they are attached to their baseball team (if the team win the national championship they jump in the river from the bridge) they don’t look so different from Napolitan people.
