There’s an old Japanese adage that says, “In Kyoto, they go bankrupt by overspending on clothing. In Osaka, they do it by overspending on food.” I don’t know if that’s true, but there’s no question Osaka is one of the world’s leading food cities. Author Michael Booth calls it, simply, “the world’s greatest food city.” If you’re not overeating here, you’re doing it wrong.
We arrived via the shortest bullet train trip ever and checked into Swissotel Nankai Osaka, not far from the wonderful, riverside madness of Dotonbori (more on that in a bit). Our first attempt at touring Osaka’s Shinsekai entertainment district, however, was far less quick or successful. Osaka, at least the area near Namba Station and its associated parks, is the most three-dimensional city I’ve ever encountered. For the first time, Google Maps was entirely clueless about how we might get from point A to point B. Over and over again we’d climb a flight of stairs, only for Maps to change its mind and send us back downstairs in a completely different direction. Often your best route to a restaurant is through a whole other building. Our hotel advertised its prime location “above” Namba Station, but we got so confused getting back there we ended up booking an Uber instead of walking. Those aren’t exorbitantly priced in Osaka, but they are several times the price of rapid transit. So imagine my chagrin and, frankly, embarrassment and irritation when I discovered on our last morning in Osaka that an entrance to our hotel was actually hidden behind a luggage storage rack in Namba Station itself. We hastened right past it without seeing it the moment we arrived. Ah, well — At least that simplified our return trip to Tokyo.
Back to Shinsekai, a destination worth visiting all by itself. It was built in 1912 in support of a literal (but long-defunct) amusement park, with its northern half meant to resemble Paris and the southern Coney Island, New York. Japan being Japan, however, Shinsekai soon became its very own thing, a kind of Vegas-meets-Shinjuku fever dream surrounding the octagonal Tsutenkaku (“Tower Reaching Heaven”). If it’s fun to do at night, this is a great place to look for it: here you’ll find pachinko parlors, ramen-ya, mahjongg clubs, and seemingly hundreds of fast-food restaurants. Many of the latter specialize in the culinary comfort food known locally as kushi-katsu, which I came to think of as unidentified frying objects. You may know it better as “fair food,” minus the deep-fried butter but plus enough ocean life to stock a municipal aquarium. If you live on the west coast, perhaps you’re familiar with the Osaka favorite takoyaki, aka octopus fritters. Actually, you probably can get fried butter in Shinsekai; I just didn’t look for that. It’s a wild place. You could explore it for years and not see everything, especially if you stuck to ground level.
We toured Osaka Castle, a beautiful palace behind imposing stone walls, before braving the culinary theme park that is Dotonbori. That district, which stretches along both sides of Dotonbori Canal, was a theater district until the last of those structures was destroyed in, you guessed it, World War II. Now it embodies the Osaka philosophy of kuidaore: “eat till you go bust.” If you want to brave the famously dangerous fugu, or blowfish, this is the place. We did not. If you want to eat quality ramen at four in the morning, welcome to Kinryu Ramen and its golden dragon billboards. Maybe you’ll be drawn in by the 21-foot-wide, animatronic crab over the entrance to Kani Doraku, a leg of which fell off and struck a customer in the mid-’90s. The facade of Dotonbori’s Don Quijote store includes a working Ferris wheel. You’ll definitely want to grab a selfie with Glica Candy’s giant LED billboard, which stars a running athlete who poses triumphantly. There are party boats and noisy bars and tempura, tempura, tempura in all directions. Is it the “real Osaka”? Absolutely not, but it sure is real something. Fun, I guess. Dotonbori is fun. It’s a lot. But also fun.
Speaking of a lot, the last stop on our overnighter in Osaka was a morning trip to Namba Yasaka, a Shinto shrine with a main building that resembles the head of a snarling lion. The lion’s head was constructed in 1975, the idea being that the lion, whose name (like that of the hall inside it) is Shishiden, swallows any bad spirits you happen to be trucking around at the time. This location has been a place of worship since the fourth century; but, and I don’t suppose this’ll surprise anyone at this point, it was razed by Allied carpet bombing and needed to be rebuilt. The kami honored here is Gozu Tenno, who wards off ill health, so this was an understandably popular shrine during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’d like to know more about Namba Yasaka Shrine, including how it relates to, of all things, the three-headed kaiju King Ghidorah, I recommend this informative Osaka.com article by Liam Carrigan.
Amanda’s mentioned several times she wishes we’d had more time to explore the less touristy parts of Osaka, and I agree. Set aside the fact that Osaka has a killer Universal Studios theme park; I wish we’d enjoyed a wabi-sabi tea ceremony at wad cafe or okonomiyaki at a popular chain called Chibo. Himeji, with its elegant “White Heron” castle, is just two hours away by train. Nara, famous for its free-roaming deer that have learned over generations that bowing deferentially to tourists earns them free food, is even closer. Many travelers continue four hours west to Hiroshima — a depressing historical site, to be sure, but one we owe our attention. I dropped those secondary destinations from our itinerary with some serious regret, so next time, I guess. And I’d like to think there will be a next time.
We skipped all that because I wanted a few more days back in Tokyo before returning home. As you’ll see, exhaustion was setting in for real — but I’m still glad we headed back north. You’ll see why soon, in what’ll likely be the penultimate entry in this epic Japan travelogue.
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