Things to do
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Abeno Harukas
Three hundred metres over sixty two floors, and the tallest building in Japan from 2014 until Tokyo took the title back nine years later. It is not an observation tower but a stack: department store, hotel, university campuses and offices, with the deck on top. Finding the right lift inside the shop is the only difficulty, and it sits directly over the station.
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Dōtonbori
Theatres lined this canal for generations before the restaurants took it over, and the illuminated signboards are what the playhouses left behind. A confectioner's runner crossing a finishing line has become shorthand for the whole city. The bank walk is flat and the bridge at Ebisubashi is where it jams. Denser after dark than at any other hour.
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Kuromon Ichiba Market
Fishmongers set up in front of the black gate of a temple called Enmyō-ji in the 1820s, and when the temple burned in 1912 and moved away the gate's name stayed on the market. The arcade runs about five hundred and eighty metres and holds roughly a hundred and fifty stalls. It trades on visitors now, where it once fed the neighbourhood.
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National Museum of Art
Only a steel sculpture stands above ground here, and the galleries are entirely beneath it, on the Nakanoshima sandbank between the two arms of the old Yodo. The Japanese name says international art, which is the real remit, and the English one does not. The island carries five other museums, a library and the city hall, so it works as a district in its own right.
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Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan
Built on the bay at Tempozan and the largest aquarium in the world when it opened in 1990, it is registered as a museum under the Museum Act. The route is a single descending spiral built around the Pacific Rim, so a visit walks the ocean downward in one continuous descent. Entry is timed and the slots sell out.
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Osaka Castle
Three keeps have stood on this site, and the one visible now went up in 1931, paid for by public subscription from the city's own citizens. It has since outlasted both its predecessors. It was built as a museum and has never been anything else, so the interior is galleries and a lift, with no rooms to speak of. The stonework and moats around it are Tokugawa.
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Osaka Castle Park
Gun foundries occupied most of this ground from 1870 until the end of the Second World War, when the arsenal was bombed flat. What replaced it is the city's second largest park: a concert hall, a baseball ground, an athletics track and an open air theatre, laid out around the moats. Plum blossom comes in February and cherry about a month later.
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Osaka Museum of History
Naniwa Palace stood on this ground in the seventh century, and its warehouse foundations, walls and water supply are on show in the basement, which makes the excavation part of the museum itself. Four floors above run the city's history downward, since the lift goes to the top and the visit descends by period. It faces the castle park across one road.
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Osaka Tenmangū
Founded in 949 and burned down so often that the gate and hall standing now date only from 1845. Its summer festival is the largest of all the Tenjin festivals and one of the three great Shinto festivals in Japan, ending with a hundred boats on the river under fireworks. Small and quick on any other day, with a long covered arcade beside it.
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Shinsaibashi
A merchant named Shinsai Okada built a wooden bridge over the Nagahori canal in 1622 and the district took his name from it. The canal has gone and the covered arcade that replaced it runs north from Dōtonbori, so the two are normally walked as one. West of Midōsuji lies Amerika-mura, a separate quarter and the centre of the city's youth culture.
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Shinsekai
Laid out in 1912 as a deliberate copy, the southern half modelled on Coney Island and the northern half on Paris, with an amusement park in the middle that lasted eleven years. The scheme failed and the quarter was left behind, which is why it resembles nowhere else in Japan. It borders one of the poorest districts in the country.
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Shitennō-ji
Founded in association with Prince Shōtoku and often called Japan's first Buddhist temple, though what stands today was rebuilt in 1963 after the war. It keeps a working religious calendar, and market stalls fill the grounds on the twenty first of each month. The outer precinct is open ground; the inner one, the garden and the treasure house are separate.
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Sumiyoshi-taisha
Head shrine to some two thousand three hundred others, and the only one whose building style carries its own name. Four National Treasure halls stand in an archaic form that predates Chinese influence on the architecture. A steeply arched bridge crosses the pond at the entrance, climbed in stepped sections, and it is the one physical demand of the visit.
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Tsūtenkaku
Its name means tower reaching heaven, and it was the centrepiece the surrounding quarter was built around. A hundred and eight metres to the tip, with the deck at ninety one. A private company owns it, not the city, which is why a permanent electronics advertisement runs down one side. At weekends the queue is the visit.
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Umeda Sky Building
Two forty-storey towers joined at the top by glass bridges across an open void, finished in 1993 to Hiroshi Hara's design. The escalator that crosses the gap in open air is the actual experience, and it does not suit anyone uneasy about heights. It stands beyond the Umeda railway lines, which means an underpass and a walk that catches arrivals out.