Osaka

While the rest of the country was governed by a warrior class, this was the place where rice and goods were cleared, priced and financed. The canals were dug to move freight. The families that effectively bankrolled the nation from here held no military rank at all. Prices were negotiated rather than decreed.

That history is the most useful frame for a visit, because it explains why the city does not reward the temple-and-garden approach and never claimed to. What it has instead is a food culture that began as vendor cooking for dock and market workers, a comedy tradition built on two people arguing rather than one performer narrating, and an unusual readiness among strangers to talk to you. Spend the evenings at counters rather than in restaurants, ask what is good, and accept that the answer will be delivered at length.

Two days for the city, and Osaka's real value is as a base. It sits closer to the middle of Kansai than Kyoto does: Kyoto is fifteen minutes by shinkansen or half an hour on the regular lines, Nara is forty-five minutes, Kobe half an hour, Himeji about forty minutes. Sleeping in Osaka and travelling out is cheaper and often faster than the reverse.

Within the city, the split is north and south. Kita, around Umeda, is the business and department-store half. Minami, around Namba and Shinsekai, is the eating and drinking half and the reason most people come. The castle sits between them. Two days covers both plus the bay area.

Three days lets you add the Kongo mountains in the south of the prefecture or the old townscape at Tondabayashi, neither of which anyone visits and both of which are half an hour out.

Kansai International Airport connects to the city in about 50 minutes by the Nankai Rapi:t or JR Haruka. Shin-Osaka handles the shinkansen and is two and a half hours from Tokyo. Within the city the Midosuji subway line links almost everything worth reaching — Shin-Osaka, Umeda, Namba, Tennoji — and the JR loop line circles the rest. Osaka is a walking city between those nodes rather than an all-day-subway one. Kyoto, Nara and Kobe are each within 30 to 45 minutes on private railways, which is why many people base themselves here. A car is a liability in central Osaka.

Nothing seasonally ruins Osaka, which is a large part of the case for basing here. August is hot and humid and the city is built of concrete, but the eating is indoors and in the evening anyway.

The constraints are events rather than seasons: the city fills for the Tenjin festival in late July and for the sumo tournament in March, and hotel prices across Kansai rise sharply during Kyoto's blossom and foliage peaks even though the crowd is next door rather than here. That last point cuts the other way too — Osaka is the sensible place to sleep during those weeks precisely because the pressure is on Kyoto's rooms.

South of the city there is a group of enormous earthen burial mounds, built in a keyhole shape with moats around them, and they predate everything else in the prefecture by a very long way. They are also almost impossible to perceive on foot: from ground level the largest of them reads as a wooded hill behind water, because the shape that makes it famous is only legible from the air.

So visit them with that in mind. The municipal museum nearby and the observation floor of the local government building exist to solve exactly this problem, and going to one of those first turns a walk around a moat from a puzzle into something worth doing. The circuit around the biggest mound is a couple of kilometres of level path and makes a good, quiet morning that almost no foreign visitor to the city ever spends.

Takoyaki and okonomiyaki both started as cheap flour cooking and both are still best from small counters rather than restaurants; the Osaka okonomiyaki is mixed in the bowl before it hits the griddle, unlike the Hiroshima layered version. Kushikatsu, skewered and fried, comes with the communal sauce pot that must not be double-dipped, a rule taken seriously in Shinsekai. Kitsune udon, with a sheet of sweet fried tofu, was invented here in the nineteenth century. The Kuromon market is the shopping end of the same tradition, trading since the Edo period.

Osaka is hot. August highs run above 35°C with the concrete holding it overnight, and there is no relief from wind or altitude anywhere in the city. September brings typhoon risk. Winters are mild and largely snow-free with January highs near 9°C, which makes the city one of the better cold-season bases in Japan. Cherry blossoms open in late March along the Okawa river and in the castle park. The Tenjin Matsuri, with boats and fireworks on the river, falls on July 24–25. Late October to early December is the most comfortable stretch of the year.

Never a car. Osaka has one of the densest urban rail networks in the world, several private railways radiating to the rest of Kansai, and expensive, scarce parking. The loop line circles the city and the subway fills in the middle.

The thing worth knowing is that the private railways — not JR — are the fast way to Nara, Koyasan, Ise and the southern prefecture, so a JR-only pass leaves a lot out. Kansai's regional passes covering the private networks are cheap and cover the airport link as well. From the airport, the private express is faster and cheaper than the JR service to most parts of the city.

A first visit is two days of eating and walking, and it should not be organised around sights. Osaka's appeal is street-level: the covered arcades, the standing bars under the railway, the kitchen-supply street, the tenement districts around Shinsekai, and the fact that people talk to you in a way they do not in Tokyo or Kyoto. The castle is worth an hour for the grounds and the view.

A second visit should use the city as a hub and go south, which almost no visitor does. The southern half of the prefecture has an old merchant townscape at Tondabayashi, mountain temples in the Kongo range, and the private railway that climbs toward Koyasan in Wakayama. Half an hour from Namba and effectively empty. The private line toward Koyasan starts here too, which makes Osaka a better staging point for that mountain than anywhere in Wakayama itself.