Umeda to Osaka Castle

Walk south from Osaka Station for about twenty minutes and you reach Nakanoshima, the long sandbar between the Dojima and Tosabori rivers that holds most of Osaka’s civic architecture: the city hall, the 1918 red-brick Central Public Hall, the prefectural library, and two art museums ninety seconds apart.

The National Museum of Art is entirely underground with only a steel entrance sculpture above the surface, and its collection exhibition is ¥430, one of the cheapest national museum tickets in Japan. On Fridays it opens to 20:00 at ¥250. It closes Mondays. Next door is the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, which opened in 2022.

If you are not stopping, the island still earns the ten minutes it takes to cross: the riverside promenades on both banks are the most pleasant walking surface in central Osaka and the rose garden at the eastern tip is free.

East from Nakanoshima the river becomes the Okawa, and the path along it is lined for well over a kilometre with cherry trees – the Kema Sakuranomiya stretch, which in early April is the best blossom walk in the city and is entirely free.

This is also the water that Tenjin Matsuri uses. On 24 and 25 July the festival’s boat procession runs along here, followed by around ninety minutes of fireworks over the river, and this bank is where you stand to watch it. On every other day of the year it is joggers.

Cross at Tenmabashi and continue south-east. From here the route leaves the water and runs through ordinary central Osaka for fifteen minutes, which is the dull part of the walk and is unavoidable.

Do the Osaka Museum of History before the castle. It is ¥600, open 9:30 to 17:00, closed Tuesdays, and it is built directly on the excavated Naniwa Palace – the seventh-century imperial capital, whose warehouse footings you can walk over on a glass floor in the basement at no extra charge.

You take the lift to the tenth floor and descend through time, and the tenth floor has a full-height window looking straight across the palace lawn at the castle. It is the best elevated view of the keep in Osaka and it is inside the ¥600. Having seen the layout from above, the walk across to the castle makes sense in a way it does not in reverse.

Then the castle: ¥1,200 since 1 April 2025, when it doubled from ¥600, open 9:00 to 18:00 with last entry 17:30. The ticket now also covers the Toyotomi Stone Wall Museum, opened in April 2025, which shows excavated 1580s masonry seven metres beneath the Tokugawa rebuild. That museum is the better half of the ticket and most visitors skip it. Metro home from Tanimachi 4-chome or Morinomiya; JR Osakajokoen is a different company.