Osaka
Osaka Castle in Blossom
Three thousand cherry trees around a seventeenth-century moat, and a keep that looks better from a distance than from inside. Which view, which hour, and what the paid garden buys you.
Osaka Castle park holds about three thousand cherry trees, and for ten days at the end of March they turn the ground around a stone fortress into something close to theatre. It is free, it is open, and it is five minutes from a subway station — which is why half the city is there at the weekend.
The castle itself is a 1931 reconstruction with a lift inside. Photograph it from the outside and spend the money on the walled garden instead.
At a glance
- Usual peak
- Late March to the first days of April
- Cost
- The park is free. The walled garden and the keep charge separately
- Best hours
- Before nine, or the last hour of light
- Getting there
- Osakajokoen or Tanimachi 4-chome station, both a short walk
- Worth paying for
- The walled garden, for the view back at the keep over the trees
Frame the keep through the trees
The keep is tall, pale and unsubtle. It works when something is in front of it — a branch, a wall, the moat — and looks like a municipal building when nothing is.
The moat is the picture
The stonework is the real survivor here: blocks weighing over a hundred tonnes, hauled across the Inland Sea four centuries ago. In blossom season the walls get ignored, which is a shame and also an opportunity, because nobody is standing where you want to be.
What to do with the rest of the day
The park sits between the business district and the shopping streets, so it combines with almost anything. The practical version is the castle in the morning, lunch in the covered arcades, and the evening on the river at Dotonbori, where the signs do the work the blossom did earlier.
If you are seeing more than two paid sights in a day, the city pass covers most of them and the subway as well.