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The plastic’s being flipped around at a pace that’s fast and furious. Another logo-emblazoned bag slung onto waiting boyfriend, another fluff of fashion that’ll be forgotten by the end of the month. These tiny, sparkly-eyed Japanese girls are not so much thrashing the plastic as giving it the beating of its life. Again, and again. Every weekend.

So you fancy yourself as a pro shopper? Take a deep breath…and dive on in to the crème of Osaka shopping streets, Tenjimbashi-suji. With the Japanese yen currently behaving quite modestly, the price of subway transport, food and souvenirs in Osaka are comparable, if not cheaper, and definitely far more fun than wherever you’ve come from.

In a country that upholds shopping as not so much a national sport as a religion, Tenjimbashi-suji the longest shopping street in Japan, clocks a heady 2.6km of shops, shops and yet more shops. It’s so long, it crosses three subway stations and a railway station. On Sundays, the kids don’t go to church, they come here to pray at the temple of temptation.

Leopard-skin gumboots? Faaaabulous!

Coathangers made of faux pearls? Gimme two. Please.

Standing at the top of the street, staring down its straight line is a personal challenge. Some people climb Everest, others see if they can, through sheer willpower and strong personal drive, get past kilometres of fabulous tat, insane bargains and deeply gorgeous designs, without blowing a year’s mortgage repayments.

The strip is littered with signs in a mix of Japanese, English and Jinglish: Hairdressers with helpful phrases, “We cooperate so that it may become the hairstyle of you [sic] ideal.”

There are entire shops given over to betrothal gifts, 10-minute fitness regimes, badges of local pop stars or knee-high socks. We tourists compare notes – must-do’s include the fantastic 100-yen shops everywhere, where you can kit an entire house with 50p items. Word on the street has it there are even Y99 shops and one canny shopper swears he’s even seen a Y98 shop! We all suck our breath in with excitement.

For the more upmarket, the Y315 (£1.50) shops are packed with gorgeous patterned thigh-high stockings and said pearl coathangers, sharing the air with a 100-year-old map maker, a bookshop selling titles in 20 languages or a shop oozing cheap yukatas, cotton wraparounds for schlepping at home.

Teams of girls gather in packs and roam, clad in platform boots, long, orange-blonde bouffant hair, cupids-bow lips and doe eyes layered with a thick sheen of perfectly beautiful make-up. They must have been up at dawn to make an 11am shopping date with their buddies. With their tiny waists and tinier mini-skirts, these gorgeous little Barbie dolls make all us foreigners look like slobbish heffalumps.

But this hard shopping is not just a girl thing. The perky little girls are rivalled by hoards of beautiful boys with plucked eyebrows and djooozhed hair, who hold luxe-brand shopping bags over their do's when it starts to rain in between the covered arcades.

With their sculpted brows, fitted suits and discreet make-up, the boys’ careful androgyny is another blow to the egos of the dishevelled traveller, who surreptitiously tries to sneak them into the foreground of our photos.

If 2.6km is no challenge for you, you could easily extend your tour of duty and follow the map all the way down Shinshibashi shopping street, through neon-bright Ebisubashi and finally emerge at the major subway and railway station of Namba, which will get you back to anywhere in Osaka.

It might add just another 700 metres onto your odyssey, but Shinshibashi is home to Retail Land’s big boys – Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Hermes. In preparation, give your plastic a pep-talk to hype it up for a thorough hiding. The Paul Smith clothes are a relative snip, and this is the place to snap up sneakers not seen on anyone else, possibly because Nike et al realise that selling glo-brite, tang-orange hi-tops might not be economically viable anywhere else but Japan.

A quick dog-leg, and we’re into the neon world of Dotombori street, of pulsating entertainment parlours and those nasty, nasty pokie dens where the fug of cigarette smoke can cause blindness, if the noise levels were low enough for you to tell anyone. Unless your lungs are well and truly already stuffed and you have a penchant for shrieking Japanese game shows, avoid at all costs.

Dotombori is overshadowed by lifelike robots and unnervingly large Hello Kittys that the platform-boot brigade totters toward for photographs. Late in the evening, it’s also where nice schoolchildren morph into ice-queen fashionistas and rebels-without-a-clue-but-big-bank-balances, posing and prancing until curfew. Strangely, although beer is dispensed by vending machines, there are no kids kicking them for free booze, as would be the case in most of the rest of the world.

For respite from the neon, slip into the Kuromon ichiba food market, where sushi chefs slog it out for the day’s catch of hairy crabs and cakes of white roe, stalked by hopeful street kittens. Then make to nearby Doguya-suji shopping arcade, where canny shoppers can snap up cute ceramic bowls, ornate chopsticks and lots of lovely, lethal kitchen utensils from as little as 50p a piece, and the fake sushi are just begging for you to slap a magnet on the back and bingo, instant nori roll fridge magnet!

The tech shopping is a blur of high-end pastel electronic goods, the charge led by giant retailer Bic Camera, whose seven-storey building on Sennichimae rivals Nipponbashi in nearby Den Den Town.

With the heady mix of game parlours, fashion boutiques, udon noodle bars and the be-seen coffee shops peddling tooth-killing strawberry custard pastries, the city positively throbs with vibrancy. Add to that the face-tingling, breath-shortening glow of a good, solid retail fix, and Osaka, I’m sold.

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