Explore Osaka

The National Museum of Art, Osaka is a largely underground museum on Nakanoshima island, designed by César Pelli and opened here in 2004 after leaving its first home on the Expo '70 site in Suita. Its collection of about 8,000 works covers Japanese and international art from 1945 onwards, shown in thematic displays that change several times a year.

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.

Osaka Museum of History opened in 2001 in a building by César Pelli & Associates and Nihon Sekkei, joined by an atrium to the NHK Osaka Broadcasting Center opposite Osaka Castle Park. Its four permanent floors trace the city's story from the 7th-century Naniwa Palace, whose excavated remains are shown in the basement, to the modern era.

Osaka Castle was begun by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1583 on the site of the Ishiyama Hongan-ji temple and rebuilt by the Tokugawa shogunate after its fall in 1615. The present keep, the third, was reconstructed in 1931 with citizens' donations and houses a museum on Hideyoshi and the castle's history, with a lookout on the top floor.

Tennōji Zoo opened on 1 January 1915 in Tennōji Park and is the third zoo to have been built in Japan, covering about 11 hectares. Its zones include an African savanna where predators and their prey appear to share one landscape, an elephant village, a walk-through bird aviary, a penguin and sea lion pool and a nocturnal house with North Island brown kiwis.

Shitennō-ji is a Buddhist temple in Tennōji ward that, according to tradition, Prince Shōtoku founded in 593, which makes it one of the oldest officially founded temples in Japan. Its central precinct sets the middle gate, five-storey pagoda, Golden Hall and lecture hall in a single line; the buildings were last rebuilt in 1963. A garden and a treasure hall lie beside it.

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.

Sumiyoshi-taisha in Sumiyoshi ward is the head shrine of the Sumiyoshi shrines across Japan, dedicated to three sea gods and Empress Jingū. Its four main sanctuaries, built in 1810 in the Sumiyoshi-zukuri style that predates mainland influence, are National Treasures; the steeply arched Sorihashi bridge, in its present form from about 1600, leads to them.

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.