Osaka Museum of History

This is the site of the Naniwa Palace, the seventh-century imperial capital that briefly made this stretch of riverbank the centre of the Japanese state before the court moved on to Asuka, Nara and eventually Kyoto. It was excavated from the 1950s onward and the modern museum was built directly over it.

In the basement, at no extra charge, you can walk on a glass floor above the exposed stone footings of the palace warehouses, in situ, where they were found. Above ground, outside the entrance, the circular stone markers on the lawn trace the postholes of the audience hall. The museum is not describing something that happened elsewhere; it is a roof over the thing it describes, which is rarer than it sounds and is the single best argument for coming here rather than reading about Naniwa.

Lifts take you to the tenth floor and you descend through time. Ten is the seventh and eighth centuries: a reconstructed section of the Naniwa Palace audience hall at full scale, red pillars, courtiers in position, and behind it the window with the castle in it. Nine is medieval and early modern Osaka, the merchant city, the temple town of Ishiyama Honganji that stood where the castle now is. Eight is the archaeology floor. Seven is the twentieth century – a reconstructed 1920s Shinsaibashi shopping street, a cinema front, the Modan Osaka of the interwar years when this was the largest city in Japan.

That seventh-floor section is the one that surprises people. Osaka’s brief spell as the country’s biggest and most industrial city, before the 1945 bombing and the post-war shift to Tokyo, is not something the city advertises, and it explains a great deal about why the place feels different from Kyoto forty minutes away.

English signage is good on the objects and thinner on the wall text; the free audio guide is worth taking. Ninety minutes is the honest figure for a full descent.

From the tenth-floor window you look east across the excavated palace lawn to the castle, with the moat and the reconstructed keep filling the frame and the Osaka Business Park towers behind. It is the picture that every guide uses for Osaka Castle and it is taken from here.

Practically, this makes the museum the right first stop of a castle day rather than an afterthought. Do the museum, get the layout of the palace and the castle from above, then walk fifteen minutes to the keep and the Toyotomi Stone Wall Museum, which the ¥1,200 castle ticket now includes. Tanimachi 4-chome station serves both and is directly beneath this building.

The museum is included on the Osaka Amazing Pass, which is a ¥600 line and not a large one, but if you are holding the pass on a Tuesday this is not the place to use it.