A bright red Ferris wheel rising from the roof of a shopping mall has become one of the most recognisable sights of the Umeda district in central Osaka. The HEP FIVE wheel turns above the youth-oriented fashion complex of the same name and has done so since the late 1990s, its bold colour standing out against the surrounding office towers and making it a favourite landmark and meeting point in the busy commercial heart of the city. The wheel reaches a height of around a hundred and six metres ab.....

Hirakata Park, affectionately known to locals as Hirapa, is one of the oldest amusement parks in Japan, set in the city of Hirakata between Osaka and Kyoto and in operation for well over a century. The park grew from chrysanthemum-doll exhibitions held in the early twentieth century, a traditional display of life-sized figures clothed in living flowers, and that horticultural heritage is still honoured in seasonal flower events, though over the decades it developed into a full amusement park wi.....

Rising on its great stone base above a sea of cherry trees, Osaka Castle is the most famous landmark of the city and a monument bound up with some of the most dramatic episodes of Japanese history. The original castle was built in the late sixteenth century by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who unified Japan after a long age of civil war, and it was conceived as the grandest fortress in the land, the seat from which he intended his family to rule. After his death the castle became the focus of .....

Osaka day trips carry visitors out from the great commercial city to the many sights of the surrounding region, one of the richest in history in all Japan. Within a short train ride lie ancient capitals, castles and temples. The city sits at the heart of a wider region that takes in several major cities, all linked by fast and frequent trains. This makes it an ideal base for exploring. A favourite trip leads to the nearby old capital, famous for its countless temples, shrines and gardens, and .....

Tennen Onsen Naniwanoyu is a natural hot-spring bathhouse in the Kita district of Osaka, offering city dwellers and visitors the chance to soak in genuine mineral water drawn from deep underground without leaving the metropolis. The name marks it out as a tennen onsen, a true natural hot spring, its water pumped from a source far below the city rather than simply heated tap water, and this authenticity is the heart of its appeal in a busy urban setting. Spread over several floors, the facility p.....

The tower called Tsutenkaku, a name that can be rendered as the tower reaching to heaven, stands at the centre of the old Shinsekai district of Osaka and has become an emblem of the city's downtown, working-class character. The present steel tower, rising about 100 metres, dates from 1956, a postwar rebuild of an earlier structure put up in 1912 that had combined echoes of the Eiffel Tower with a replica of a Parisian arch below; that first tower was dismantled during the Second World War when i.....

Few structures sum up the spirit of a neighbourhood as completely as Tsutenkaku does for the Shinsekai quarter of Osaka, where the tower has loomed over the streets since 1956. An earlier version, raised in 1912 as the centrepiece of a brand-new entertainment district modelled partly on Paris and partly on New York's Coney Island, was lost during the Second World War when its metal was requisitioned, and the present 100-metre steel tower was built by local subscription to bring the landmark back.....

One of the boldest pieces of architecture in Osaka, the Umeda Sky Building consists of two forty-storey towers joined near the top by a ring-shaped bridge that frames the open air, the whole forming what its designer, Hiroshi Hara, imagined as a gateway to the sky. Completed in 1993, the building was originally conceived as part of a far more ambitious cluster of four linked towers, of which only two were ever built, and its daring profile has made it a frequent fixture on lists of striking mode.....