Learning to Love Osaka

There’s Japan. And there’s Osaka. The two are not intrinsically separate, but this neon-saturated multiverse defies many of the rules and courtesies I’ve come to understand about Japan over my 20-something visits to it in the last dozen years. Sprawling, flat, crescent-shaped Osaka and its 24 ku (wards) make up Japan’s second biggest metropolitan area, with a whopping metro-wide population of 19 million. It may be second in size to Tokyo, but it’s the world’s tenth-largest city—and it feels like it every second you’re inside its belly. 

Osaka is a brash, chaotic city that as an introvert I always dreaded. Even after several visits, I just never jived with it. Unlike Tokyo’s orderly ramen counter seats with eyeball-height place dividers that let you avoid eye contact with your neighbor, and the rest of Japan’s quiet yakinku and izakaya booths for one (with their own individual sliding shoji screens or noren curtains to shut out the world), Osaka struck me as a quintessential “the more the merrier” kind of town. Unlike the rest of Japan, getting out of a restaurant here without a conversation feels near impossible. But on a recent trip, I discovered new ways to avoid its crowds and found myself enjoying it more than I had on previous visits. 

Trying to deconstruct and make sense of Osaka has long been a problem, and not just for me. It’s forever measured against its larger and more gracious sibling, Tokyo, and comparisons often portray it as a brash, gluttonous merchant city. That’s mostly true—Osaka is no delicate flower like its leafy, temple-dotted neighbors Kyoto and Nara. It’s known for its fast pace, good-humored snarkiness, baseball fans, yakuza mafia, and a frenetic food culture that can and will exhaust a traveler in an afternoon. And that’s precisely what repeat visitors love about it.

But Japan’s second city is also at a crossroads. It recently hosted the 2025 World Expo, themed “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” showcasing how it’s more than a food-loving merchant city, but also a platform for cutting-edge architecture. And it’s also home to a slow-growing greening process that has defied all expectations and strangely compliments the megalopolis’s concrete and neon bones. But how do you tackle a city like Osaka? Below are five ways to get under the skin of this notoriously busy and misunderstood

1. Don’t Mistake Dotonbori For Osaka

Touristy? Extremely. But this neon-saturated canal area in the city center is still a sight to see. When I first saw photos of Dotonbori, it looked almost melancholy and forlorn, like some sort of long-lost Hong Kong neighborhood. It’s nothing of the sort. Expect to get swept up into the frenetic parade of other tourists marching, mostly bewildered, through this iconic, technicolor neighborhood. And that’s exactly what I do on my visits, as I try not to look like a googly-eyed tourist while marveling at the giant animatronic crab, the vapor hissing dragons, the red-faced gyoza vendors, and thick glare of unapologetic neon commercial flamboyance glinting off the neighborhood’s namesake and eternally photographed canal. Since this is the Times Square of Osaka, soak it up while you’re there, and move along quickly to make space for others. The most popular spots in the nine-block-long neighborhood are the Tonbori Riverwalk, where you can catch the reflection of neon on the water, the electroplasma