Photo: 663highland / CC BY 2.5Osaka is the city Japan calls its kitchen, a merchant town in a country once run by warriors, where money outranked birth. It is known for food eaten standing up, for Osaka Castle, whose walls saw old Japan's last great battle in 1615, and for comedy as a civic duty. Every ship docks at Tempozan, beside the aquarium, five minutes' walk from a subway that reaches the castle and Dotonbori's takoyaki stalls in 15–25 minutes.
For most of the Edo period, the rice that paid every samurai in Japan was shipped to Osaka, warehoused by merchants, and sold. The city was called the nation’s kitchen, and it produced something Japan had nowhere else: a place where money outranked birth.
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A bunraku puppet is a metre tall and needs three operators, all of them visible on stage. The chief handler works barefaced. Within ten minutes you stop seeing them — which is the entire art, and it was perfected in this city.
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Tokugawa Ieyasu won at Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603. He was not finished. Hideyoshi’s heir still held Osaka Castle, and in the winter of 1614 and the summer of 1615 Ieyasu destroyed him here — the last major battle in Japan for two and a half centuries.
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Osaka’s word for itself is kuidaore — to ruin yourself by eating. What that produced is a canon of dishes designed to be cheap, fast, hot and eaten upright, and a city that would genuinely rather you enjoyed the ¥400 one than the ¥4,000 one.
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Two people, a microphone, one who says stupid things and one who hits him for it. Manzai is Japan’s dominant comedy form, it is essentially an Osaka export, and in this city the ability to be funny is treated as a genuine social skill rather than a talent.
Read the story →Cruise seasons run spring to autumn, but the port changes underneath them.
Comfortable walking before the crowds. Blossom usually opens at the very end.
The castle park is one of Osaka’s great hanami sites, and free.
Dry, mild and long-lit. Kyoto day trips are at their most comfortable.
Osaka does covered arcades better than almost any Japanese city. Barely affects a good plan.
One of Japan’s three great festivals, on 24–25 July, with boats and fireworks on the river.
Serious humidity. Eat underground at midday and come back out at five.
Late September turns comfortable and cruise calls stack up.
Clear and mild, and Kyoto is not yet at its autumn peak crush.
Beautiful, and the single busiest month for day trips inland.
Fewer visitors, clearer air, and the food is unaffected. Osaka is an all-weather port.
