This is a column about cheap food, and it doesn't come much cheaper than Osaka's Super Tamade supermarket chain. When I first arrived in the city I lived almost exclusively on precooked nikku jagga, a shrink-wrapped beef, carrot and potato bowl retailing at around ¥100. Haute cuisine it isn't, but it keeps you alive.

You don't just go to Tamade for rock-bottom prices; it's also a fascinatingly colorful trip in its own right. There are 54 branches in greater Osaka, most of them open 24 hours. They illuminate some of the city's greyest, most downtrodden districts like thunderbolts: yellow facades, flashing neon signs, sparkling LEDs in the shape of fireworks. The interior decor is surprisingly lavish for a discount emporium: Neon rainbows, birds and animals hang overhead, evoking a pachinko parlor with a Noah's Ark theme.

Part of the pleasure of a trip to Tamade — go at 3 a.m., if you want even more weirdness — is to mingle with those who shop there. Men shuffle along the aisles in Crocs and pajamas, and ancient hunched ladies mumble to themselves. If Tom Waits lived in Japan he'd have written a song or two about this place. The Chinese checkout women, all dressed in a lurid shade of pink, fling the change into your hand brusquely.