Osaka大阪

The first Osaka was Naniwa, a harbour on the edge of a shallow bay where ships from the Inland Sea met the rivers leading inland to the Yamato plain. Envoys from Korea and China landed here, and Buddhism came with them. By tradition Prince Shōtoku founded Shitennō-ji in 593, and in the seventh and eighth centuries emperors built palaces on the Uemachi upland more than once, making Naniwa a capital for short periods before the court settled in Nara and then Kyoto.

In 1496 the priest Rennyo of the True Pure Land school built a temple on the northern tip of the same upland. It grew into Ishiyama Hongan-ji, a walled temple town defended by armed believers, and it resisted the warlord Oda Nobunaga from 1570 until a negotiated surrender in 1580. The name Ōsaka, 'big slope', came into wide use in this period.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi began Osaka Castle on the temple site in 1583 and ordered merchants from nearby towns to settle below it. After his death the Tokugawa besieged the castle twice, in the winter of 1614 and the summer of 1615, and destroyed the Toyotomi line. The shogunate then rebuilt the castle on a larger scale and governed Osaka directly as a commercial city, not as a samurai domain; only a few hundred samurai lived among several hundred thousand townspeople.

Modern Osaka was an industrial giant. Cotton mills and shipyards earned it the nickname 'Manchester of the East', and after absorbing its suburbs in 1925 it was briefly the largest city in Japan. Air raids in 1945 destroyed much of the centre. The postwar city rebuilt around its railways, staged Expo '70 in the northern suburbs, opened Kansai International Airport on an artificial island in 1994, and hosted a second world expo on Yumeshima island in 2025.

Under the Tokugawa, Osaka became the market where western Japan turned rice into money. Domain lords shipped their tax rice to warehouses along the rivers, and merchants sold it, lent against it and traded rice certificates. The Dōjima Rice Exchange, recognised by the shogunate in 1730, dealt in rice for future delivery and is often described as the first organised futures market. The city was nicknamed 'the kitchen of the nation' because so much of the country's food passed through it.

Merchant money shaped the street plan. Wealthy families dug canals such as Dōtonbori and Nishi-Yokobori at their own cost and built most of the bridges; the shogunate paid for only a handful. Neighbourhoods specialised by trade, and some still do: Dōshōmachi for medicines, where pharmaceutical companies keep their head offices, and Sennichimae Dōguyasuji for kitchen tools.

The food culture grew from the same trade. Kelp from Hokkaido arrived on coastal ships and became the base of Osaka's pale, delicate dashi, which is why udon here is served in clear broth. Kitsune udon with sweet fried tofu is credited to an Osaka udon shop in the 1890s, pressed box sushi (hakozushi) was the local style before Tokyo's nigiri spread, and the cheap flour dishes that visitors now come for, takoyaki and okonomiyaki, took their present forms in the 1930s to 1950s.

The attitude is summed up in kuidaore, often translated as 'eat until you drop' or 'ruin yourself on food'. Osaka's reputation is for value rather than refinement, though Kitashinchi's counters are among the most expensive in Japan. The same practical spirit gave the world instant ramen, invented in nearby Ikeda in 1958, and the conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, first opened in Higashi-Osaka the same year.

Hideyoshi's castle was designed to overawe, with a black-lacquered and gilded keep over a double ring of moats. Almost none of it survives. The stone walls visitors see today were built by the Tokugawa from 1620 over the buried Toyotomi walls, using stones supplied by dozens of feudal lords; the largest, the Tako-ishi inside the Sakura-mon gate, is estimated at over 100 tonnes. Excavations have exposed parts of the older walls beneath.

The Tokugawa keep was struck by lightning in 1665 and not rebuilt. In 1931 the city raised a new keep in reinforced concrete, paid for by public donation, loosely based on a Toyotomi-era screen painting. It survived the 1945 air raids, which destroyed the arsenal beside it, and was renovated in the 1990s; it is now a registered cultural property and a museum with a lift inside. Thirteen older structures, including gates and turrets, are listed Important Cultural Properties.

Osaka's early-twentieth-century boom left a line of Western-style buildings along the rivers. The red-brick Central Public Hall on Nakanoshima (1918) was funded by a stockbroker, Iwamoto Einosuke, and the neighbouring Nakanoshima Library (1904) was a gift from the Sumitomo family. In Kitahama and Senba, small office buildings of the 1920s and 30s now house cafés and shops.

Midōsuji, widened into a 44-metre boulevard in the 1930s with the city's first subway underneath, was a statement of municipal ambition under mayor Seki Hajime. Postwar landmarks include the 1956 Tsūtenkaku tower, Hiroshi Hara's Umeda Sky Building (1993) with its roof ring joining two towers, and Abeno Harukas (2014), 300 metres high above Tennōji station. North of Osaka Station, the old freight yard is being turned into Grand Green Osaka, a park and tower district opening in stages (check).

Dōtonbori was a theatre street before it was a food street. From the 1620s the shogunate licensed playhouses on its south bank, and at its peak the canal was lined with kabuki and puppet theatres, their tea-houses serving the audience between acts. In 1684 the chanter Takemoto Gidayū opened his puppet theatre here, and the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote for him; 'The Love Suicides at Sonezaki' (1703), based on a real double suicide in Osaka, made the form a hit.

The puppet theatre later took the name bunraku from a nineteenth-century company. Each main puppet is worked by three people in full view, with a chanter and a shamisen player telling the story from a side stage. UNESCO lists it as intangible heritage, and the National Bunraku Theatre in Nippombashi, opened in 1984, remains its home stage; performances run in seasonal blocks rather than year-round (check the programme).

Osaka is also the capital of Japanese comedy. Manzai, a rapid-fire double act of a straight man and a fool, was modernised in Osaka in the 1930s, and the entertainment company Yoshimoto Kōgyō, founded in the city in 1912, still runs Namba Grand Kagetsu and trains many of the comedians on national television. The quick back-and-forth of the Osaka dialect is part of the act.

The theatre street survives mostly in fragments. The Shōchikuza building on Dōtonbori keeps a 1923 facade, Hōzen-ji's lane preserves the scale of the old side streets, and the giant moving signs along the canal, a crab, a pufferfish and a clown drummer, are the modern descendants of theatre advertising.

The Kita–Minami split is old. Minami, the south, grew around the theatres of Dōtonbori and the pleasure quarters nearby, and it still keeps the late hours. Kita, the north, grew after 1874 when the first railway station was built at Umeda, then a district of reclaimed rice paddies; the private railways followed, and department stores went up over their terminals. Hankyu's founder Kobayashi Ichizō pioneered this pattern of railway, suburb and terminal store.

Shinsekai, 'New World', was laid out on part of the 1903 industrial exposition grounds and opened in 1912 with a Paris-inspired radial plan and a tower modelled on the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. An amusement park, Luna Park, stood beside it. The first tower was dismantled in 1943 for its steel; the present Tsūtenkaku dates from 1956. After years of decline the district became a stage set of Shōwa-era signs and kushikatsu counters.

Tsuruhashi, east of the centre, is home to one of Japan's largest Korean communities, many descended from people who came from Jeju Island in the colonial period. Its covered market and yakiniku restaurants took shape in the black market around the station after 1945. South of Shinsekai, the Airin district in Nishinari was for decades Japan's largest day-labourer quarter; cheap lodgings there now also house budget travellers.

Tenjinbashisuji, a covered shopping street of about 2.6 kilometres, runs north from Osaka Tenmangū shrine and is often called the longest in Japan. Around JR Tenma station, small bars and grills fill the lanes. Nakanoshima, the island between the Dōjima and Tosabori rivers, was once lined with domain warehouses; today it holds the art museums, the city hall and the Bank of Japan's Osaka branch.

Osaka calls itself the city of water, Mizu no Miyako. In the Edo period there were so many canals and bridges that people said Osaka had 'eight hundred and eight bridges', as against Edo's 'eight hundred and eight streets'. Goods moved by boat to warehouses in the heart of the city, and river festivals were the biggest events of the year.

The Tenjin Matsuri, held on 24 and 25 July since the tenth century, is the survivor. On the second evening about a hundred boats carry the shrine's deities up the Ōkawa river under fireworks, watched by over a million people from the banks. Most of the canals were filled in during the twentieth century to build roads, but Dōtonbori and the Ōkawa remain, and the Tombori riverwalk, opened along Dōtonbori in the 2000s, turned the canal back towards the city.

The bay has been the city's frontier for a century and a half. Land was reclaimed for docks and factories, then for Tempozan's aquarium and Universal Studios Japan, which opened in 2001 on former industrial land. Kansai International Airport, built on an artificial island and opened in 1994, was a response to noise limits at Itami; in 2018 a typhoon flooded it and knocked a tanker into its only bridge, stranding travellers for a day.

Yumeshima, a landfill island, hosted Expo 2025 from April to October under the theme of designing future society, with a giant wooden ring by Sou Fujimoto around the pavilions. After the Expo the site is being cleared and redeveloped; Japan's first integrated casino resort is planned there for around 2030, and part of the ring is to be kept (check). Planning a visit to the island itself is not worthwhile for now.