Osaka Castle
Begin with the stone. Before you look up at the keep, look at what it stands on: two raised platforms of landfill held up by sheer walls of cut rock, built with a technique called burdock piling, each one rising straight out of a moat. Toyotomi Hideyoshi built the castle here in 1583, and it played a major role in the unification of Japan in the late sixteenth century.
The defences come in layers. An inner moat runs inside the grounds, wet on one side and dry on the other, while the outer moat surrounds the whole castle in four water-filled sections, one for each cardinal direction. Two main checkpoints guarded it: the Otemon Gate and the Aoyamon Gate. Keep an eye on the walls for the megaliths, including the huge Octopus stone, which have no official protection but are hard to miss.
Thirteen structures on the grounds are listed as Important Cultural Properties, among them the Otemon and Sakuramon gates, turrets such as Inui-yagura, Sengan and Tamon, the Kinmeisui Well, the Kinzo Storehouse and the Enshogura gunpowder magazine. Around the Otemon Gate, three sections of dobei, an old mud-and-plaster wall, each carry that status on their own.
The keep rises five storeys on the outside and eight inside, set on a tall stone base meant to keep attackers at a distance. Going in costs admission, and the payoff is the view from the top across the Osaka Plain, from Osaka Bay to Mount Ikoma. If you love panoramas, it is worth it; if your day is tight, the walls, moats and gates outside tell much of the story for free.
From the keep, a 680 m walk of about 10 minutes takes you into the wider green of Osaka Castle Park.
