Osaka's culture runs deeper than takoyaki: Japan's first Buddhist temple, the birthplace of bunraku puppet theatre, a ceramics collection of national-treasure rank, and Tadao Ando's brutalist concrete scattered across the riverfront wards.
Opened February 2022 on Nakanoshima island: a matte-black cube by Endo Kazuyuki with a vast diagonal atrium. Holds 6,000 works including Modigliani's 'Woman with a Fan' and Sata Yoshiyuki graphics. 10:00–17:00, closed Mondays.
Almost entirely underground, three floors beneath Nakanoshima, entered through César Pelli's curved steel facade evoking bamboo. Strong postwar Japanese collection: Gutai group, Yoshihara Jirō, plus Picasso and Cézanne. Closed Mondays.
Reopened April 2024 after renovation. Roughly 6,000 pieces from the Ataka collection of Korean and Chinese ceramics, including two National Treasures. Several rooms use filtered natural daylight so glazes shift as clouds pass.
A grid of wooden nagaya row houses that survived the 1945 firebombing, now converted into single-room galleries, secondhand bookshops and coffee roasters. Salon de AManTO occupies a 100-year-old house; most spaces close around 19:00.
Ten floors descending chronologically from the 7th-century Naniwa Palace at the top. Floor 10's red pillars reconstruct the Daigokuden throne hall, and the windows look straight down onto the excavated palace foundations and Osaka Castle.
Home of bunraku, the puppet theatre that developed in Osaka around 1684 under Takemoto Gidayū and playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Three puppeteers work one half-life-size figure while a tayū chanter and shamisen player narrate.
Founded 593 by Prince Shōtoku, Japan's oldest state-built Buddhist temple, laid out in the straight-line Shitennō-ji style: gate, pagoda, hall, lecture hall on one axis. The garden interprets the Pure Land described in Buddhist sutras.
A 1923 Renaissance-revival theatre, the first Western-style cinema-theatre in Japan, now Osaka's main kabuki house. Programmes run in monthly blocks; single-act tickets sell same-day for a fraction of the full price.
Eleven Important Cultural Property farmhouses dismantled in their home regions and rebuilt in Hattori Ryokuchi park, including a steep gasshō-zukuri house from Gifu and a Nanbu magariya stable-house from Iwate. Closed Mondays.
The only museum anywhere dedicated to kamigata-e — Osaka-school woodblock prints of kabuki actors, drawn by amateur fans rather than professional studios, so faces are unflatteringly realistic next to Edo's idealised portraits.
Founded in the 3rd century and rebuilt in sumiyoshi-zukuri, an architectural style predating Chinese influence: straight roofs, no curve, no vermilion railings. The steep Sorihashi drum bridge was donated by Yodo-dono, Hideyoshi's consort.
Built 1912 as a world's-fair district — the south half copied Coney Island, the north half Paris. The current 103m Tsūtenkaku dates to 1956; Billiken, the shrine's American-designed luck god, sits on the fifth floor for foot-rubbing.