🇯🇵 Osaka

Overview

Osaka is Japan's third-largest city, with about 2.7 million residents and nearly 19 million across the Kansai region. It was the country's commercial capital for centuries — a merchant city rather than an imperial or samurai one — and that history still shows in the temperament: more direct, louder and funnier than Tokyo, with its own dialect and a national reputation for comedy. It calls itself the nation's kitchen, and the local phrase kuidaore means roughly 'eat until you collapse'.

Landmarks & culture

• Osaka Castle — A reconstruction of the 16th-century fortress that unified Japan, on massive original stone foundations inside a moated park. The park is free and spectacular in cherry blossom season.
• Shitennoji Temple — Founded in 593, it is considered the oldest officially administered Buddhist temple in Japan. Quiet and largely visitor-free compared with Kyoto's famous sites.
• Umeda Sky Building — Two towers joined at the top by a floating garden observatory, reached by an escalator suspended through open air. The view at sunset covers the whole Kansai plain.

Things to do

• Dotonbori at night — A canal lined with enormous mechanical signs — the running Glico man, a moving crab — and packed with food stalls. Loud, bright and the single most Osaka place in Osaka.
• Kuromon Market — Six hundred metres of covered market selling fugu, wagyu skewers, scallops grilled at the stall and fruit priced like jewellery. Go hungry, mid-morning.
• A base for Kansai — Kyoto is fifteen minutes by fast train, Nara with its temple deer about forty, and Kobe half an hour. Osaka is cheaper to stay in than Kyoto and just as well connected.

Gastronomy