Explore Osaka

A red Ferris wheel built into the roof of the HEP FIVE shopping centre in Umeda, Kita ward, opened with the building in 1998. Its 52 air-conditioned gondolas, boarded from the seventh floor, turn on a wheel 75 metres across whose top stands about 106 metres above the street, with views over Osaka towards the Rokko and Ikoma mountains.

Two 40-storey towers in Kita ward, designed by Hiroshi Hara and completed in 1993, joined at the top by the Kuchu Teien (Floating Garden) Observatory. Visitors ride a glass-sided escalator across the open gap between the towers to the 39th and 40th floors and step out onto a 360-degree open-air rooftop deck some 170 metres up.

A 108-metre steel tower in the Shinsekai district of Naniwa ward, built in 1956 to a design by Tachū Naitō on the site of a first tower of 1912. Glass-walled observation floors at about 85 metres hold a figure of Billiken, a good-luck character linked with the tower, and an open-air deck sits above them; the tower is a registered cultural property.

Abeno Harukas is a 300-metre skyscraper in Osaka's Abeno ward, completed in 2014 above Ōsaka Abenobashi Station and the tallest building in Japan until 2023. It holds a department store, a hotel, offices and an art museum; the Harukas 300 observatory occupies the top floors, 58 to 60, with glass walls on all sides.

A permanent night-time exhibition by the art collective teamLab in Nagai Botanical Garden, in Higashisumiyoshi ward in the south of Osaka, running since 2022. After dark, light and sound installations respond to visitors, wind and rain among the trees, meadows and central lake of the garden, which opened in 1974 and covers 24 hectares.

A 256-metre skyscraper on Sakishima island in Osaka Bay, Suminoe ward, built as the Osaka World Trade Center and now holding offices of the Osaka prefectural government. A glass lift climbs to the 52nd floor and a 42-metre escalator leads to the observatory at the top, 252 metres up, which looks out in every direction over the city and the bay.