Nakazakicho

From the late 1990s the cheap rents pulled in people who wanted small premises: coffee roasters, second-hand clothes dealers, bookbinders, one-room galleries, a lot of people selling ceramics out of what is plainly somebody’s front room. The houses were not restored so much as reoccupied – timber left grey, hand-painted signs, entrances you have to duck for.

This is now a known quantity rather than a secret, and there are weekends when the lanes are busy with photographers. It has not been tidied up, though, and that is the difference between Nakazakicho and the restored merchant quarters you find elsewhere in Japan. Washing still hangs out. People live here. Several of the best cafes have no sign at all in any language.

The pleasure of the place is that there is nothing to see in the sense of a monument. You walk the grid between Nakazakicho station and Ogimachi, take the lanes that look too narrow to go anywhere, and stop when something has a door open. An hour and a half is about right.

These are one-person and two-person businesses, and they keep the hours of one-person and two-person businesses. Monday is the commonest closing day, several places open only Thursday to Sunday, and a number close for a week at a time without warning. A Sunday afternoon gives you the best chance of finding things open and the worst crowds; a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon is the compromise.

Most cafes open around 11:00 or 12:00 and close by 18:00 or 19:00. Arriving at ten in the morning gets you an empty and slightly bleak set of lanes; arriving at eight in the evening gets you a residential district in the dark. This is an afternoon place and only an afternoon place.

Coffee runs ¥500 to ¥700 and lunch ¥1,000 to ¥1,500. Many places are cash only and several have four seats, so do not build a fixed plan around a specific cafe.

Nakazakicho on the Osaka Metro Tanimachi line puts you in the middle of it, one stop from Higashi-Umeda. From Osaka Station the walk is ten to fifteen minutes east and is the better arrival, because you pass abruptly out of the station district into the old grid and the contrast is the whole point.

Pair it with the Umeda Sky Building at the end of the day – the observatory runs to 22:30 – or with the National Museum of Art on Nakanoshima, twenty-five minutes’ walk south, which is ¥430 and closed Mondays. A Monday afternoon is a bad day for both of those and for most of Nakazakicho, which is worth planning around.

Ogimachi Park, at the eastern edge, is the nearest open green space and a reasonable place to sit if everything you wanted to visit turns out to be shut, which on a first attempt it frequently is.