A city that charges almost nothing to look at

Osaka is Japan’s third-largest city by population and the commercial capital of the Kansai region — about 2.7 million people in the city itself, inside a metropolitan area of roughly 19 million that also takes in Kyoto and Kobe. It is built on a river delta, divided into 24 wards, and organised around two centres rather than one: Kita in the north around Umeda, and Minami in the south around Namba.

It began as Naniwa, a port and briefly an imperial capital in the seventh century, and its modern character was set in the Edo period, when it became the kitchen of the nation — the warehouse and rice-market city through which most of Japan’s trade passed. That is a merchant history rather than a courtly one, and the difference from Kyoto is still audible: Osaka has its own dialect, its own comedy tradition and a reputation for directness. Bombing destroyed much of the city in 1945, which is why the castle keep is a 1931 reconstruction standing on original seventeenth-century walls, and why so much of the centre is post-war.

It is known above all for food — takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu are all local, and the city’s own word kuidaore means to ruin yourself by eating. Also for the neon of Dotonbori, for comedy, for being noticeably cheaper and less formal than Tokyo or Kyoto, and for being the easiest base in Japan from which to reach somewhere else.