I'm hurtling through a course of neon-lit puddles in a sudden spring downpour. Blinking electronic signs blip out slogans about ramen, Asahi beer, and curiously amorphous octopus balls. With each sign reflected in the canal below, it feels like floating through a digital void. Giant animatronic crabs and dragons climb 12-story buildings. Smoke and steam rise off the sidewalk meat vendors, and directly in the path ahead are platoons of hungry folk armed with plaid umbrellas, bundles of shopping bags, and plates of food. Osaka's Dotonbori neighborhood can feel like a real-life video game.
Frenetic and disorderly, Osaka is not like Tokyo. It's wackier, edgier, and harder to categorize. It's also not like the rest of Japan. It was one of the first places in the country to legalize same-sex marriage and is the baseball capital and rumored headquarters of the yakuza, Japan's tattoo-covered mafia. It also remains the only place in left-oriented Japan to use the right-standing rule on escalators. I've traveled through most of Japan's 47 prefectures, but Osaka has always been a beguiling, confusing, and crowded nut to crack.
This near-impenetrability is partly why the sprawling, glowing, street-food hub is on the rise for travelers. Inbound tourism to Osaka surged fivefold between 2012 and 2017 and is now outpacing Tokyo. Renzo Piano's shiny airport, located in Osaka Bay, reopened last year after a typhoon forced it to close temporarily; it has new nonstops from London on British Airways and from Seattle on Delta (you fly into Osaka's Kansai airport to get to Kyoto, too, about an hour away). The city also has 97 Michelin stars, including four three-star restaurants.
But it's more street food and less stiff dining that keeps the Dotonbori district packed with smartphone-yielding millennials on any given Friday. The city's most visited neighborhood delivers on the clichéd notion tourists have of a bright, hyper-vertical, crowded Japan, and I am grateful to be with an Osakan and guide, Ayako, who cuts through it all with the ease of a knife in butter. “I'm taking you to a very special kushikatsu restaurant for our first dinner,” she says, speeding ahead of me. Dinner, she lets me know, happens twice in Osaka, and she pulls me down a side alley away from the crowds scarfing okonomiyaki (savory pancakes), for our first of the night.
Tranquil and upscale, Shiruhisa Hozenji is a Showa-era den of kushikatsu, Osaka's famous fast food. The skewers of breaded and deep-fried vegetables, fish, and meat are served with raw cabbage to standing diners at hundreds of counters across the city and typically washed down with frosty mugs of beer instead of sake. This cozy brick-and-wood-paneled tavern has stained-glass windows and 15 counter seats, each laid with a copper tray and various homemade sauces and salts. Its chef, Shiruhisa-san, is known for his ornate kushikatsu twists, like prawns twined around fiddleheads, butterbur wrapped delicately in tofu, and shiso leaves with flaky whitefish. Among his most popular dishes is a dessert: a deep-fried strawberry enveloped in bitter matcha mochi, as elegant as it is delicious and a reminder that Osakan food can hold its own against Kyoto's graceful kaiseki and Tokyo's VIP sushi counters.
Reentering the city's bustle, with its jammed subway stations and throngs of visitors, is sobering after hours of katsu and sake. Still, pockets of Osaka can be tranquil, like Ukiyo Shoji, a serene back alley in Dotonbori strewn with red lanterns and tangled nests of telephone lines that's home to a street-art project depicting Osaka's merchant past. Here, I allow myself to relish Osaka's order, rather than its chaos, like the 17th-century Hozenji Temple, a shrine housing Fudo Myo-o, a Buddhist deity of self-discipline, covered in a thick coating of moss, made greener by the pilgrims who splash cupfuls of water over it as they pass by. Then, while gazing at the view, my stomach grumbles for dinner number two. Leaning against the gyoza takeout counter of Ramen Todai Dotonbori, a Tokushima-style ramen shop, I tune out the noise and neon and narrow my focus on a small halved green sudachi (Japanese citrus), which I squeeze onto my paper plate of crispy, golden, and delightfully oily gyoza. In Osaka, tranquility is a state of mind.