Osaka, Japan
大阪城 · OH-sah-kah joh
A peasant's son who made himself master of Japan built his castle here in 1583. His enemies burned it, buried it and built a bigger one on top. The white tower you see is the third, made of concrete in 1931 and paid for by the people of Osaka. The walls and moats are the real thing.
Photo: 663highland, CC BY 2.5, Wikimedia Commons
You are on a bridge over a moat as wide as a river. In front of you a wall of grey stone rises straight out of the water, higher than a ten-storey building and perfectly smooth, curving outward at the foot like the side of a ship. Far above it, small and white among the trees, is a tower with a green roof and gold at the corners.
The first castle was begun in 1583. In that year, in Ming China, the Italian priest Matteo Ricci was allowed to settle in Guangdong, and in the north-east a young chief named Nurhaci began the wars that would make his grandson emperor in Beijing.
The park, the gates, the walls and the moats are free at all hours. You pay for the tower, and separately for the western garden.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The park, gates and walls | Free, always open |
| The Ōte-mon and Thousand-Coin Turret | Free from outside |
| The Octopus Stone | Free |
| The tower (Osaka Castle Museum) | 1,200 yen |
| The Toyotomi Stone Wall Museum | Included with the tower |
| The Nishinomaru Garden | 200 yen; more in cherry season |
| Hōkoku Shrine | Free |
| The plum grove | Free; in flower in February |
Toyotomi Hideyoshi began life as a farmer's son and a servant who carried his lord's sandals. By 1590 he ruled all Japan. He built this castle to be larger than any other, with a tower of five roofs covered in gold leaf and black lacquer.
He died in 1598 and left a son of five. In 1615 the boy, now twenty-one, was besieged here by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the lord who had sworn to protect him. The castle burned. The son and his mother died in the ruins.
The Tokugawa then buried what was left under as much as ten metres of earth and built a new castle on top, with higher walls and a white tower. Lightning burned that tower in 1665. For the next 266 years the castle had none.
The tower in front of you was built in 1931, in concrete, with lifts. It is a museum. Go up it for the view, and walk round it for the walls.
"This is Hideyoshi's castle." Nothing of his can be seen above ground. Every wall and moat you walk past was built by the family that destroyed his.
"The tower is a fake." It is a building of 1931 and is now protected as one. It is older than most things in Osaka, and it came through the bombing of 1945 when the arsenal round it was flattened.
"It looks as it did in the old days." The white walls copy the Tokugawa tower and the top storey, black with gold tigers, copies Hideyoshi's. No such mixture ever stood here before.
"The great stones were lifted by some lost art." They were dragged on sledges over seaweed and logs by thousands of men, and the lords who sent them carved their marks on the stones to prove it.
The stops go in by the main gate on the west, up to the tower and out to the north.
The Ōte-mon is the front door. You cross the outer moat on a causeway, pass through a gate, and find yourself in a square yard with a second, heavier gate at right angles. An attacker who broke the first door would be shot from three sides while trying to turn.
The white turret on the corner to your left dates from 1620 and is the oldest building in the castle. Its name, the Thousand-Coin Turret, is older still: it comes from the temple-fortress that stood here before the castle and was besieged for ten years in the 1570s.
In 1620 the Tokugawa ordered sixty-four lords of western Japan to rebuild the castle at their own cost. It kept them poor and busy. The walls run for twelve kilometres and stand up to thirty-two metres above the moat, the highest in Japan.
There is no mortar. Each block is cut to fit its neighbours and leans a little inward. The curve at the foot spreads the weight and lets the wall ride an earthquake.
Look closely at the faces of the stones. Many carry a small carved sign: a circle, a cross, a fan. They are the marks of the lords and their work gangs.
Inside the Sakura Gate, the wall facing you contains a single slab eleven metres long and more than five high, about the area of thirty-six sleeping mats. It is the largest stone in any Japanese castle. It weighs something over a hundred tonnes and came by sea from an island 150 kilometres away.
It is thin, less than a metre thick: a facing, set up like a screen to astonish people coming in. The stain on its left side is shaped like an octopus, which gave it its name.
The tower is 55 metres high from the ground. It has five roofs and eight floors. In 1928 the mayor asked the citizens for money to rebuild it, and the whole sum came in within six months, much of it in small coins.
At the ends of the top ridge are two golden fish with the heads of tigers, tails in the air. They are charms against fire: the creature is said to spout water. Under the eaves of the top storey are crouching tigers in gold.
Look for the scarred patches on the stone base. They are from the air raids of 1945.
Take the lift to the fifth floor and climb the last three by the stairs, or walk up through the museum. The best thing in it is a painted screen of the battle of 1615, made for one of the generals who fought in it. It shows five thousand tiny figures: soldiers, horses, and townspeople running for the river with their children.
The top floor is an open gallery fifty metres up. Find the two rings of moat below you, and the office towers beyond them. Hideyoshi's castle covered four times the area you can see.
In 1959 engineers drilling near the tower struck a stone wall seven metres down. It was Hideyoshi's, built of rough natural boulders, quite unlike the cut blocks above. A drawing of his castle found the next year showed where the rest must lie.
Since April 2025 a small museum beside the tower has let you walk down and stand in front of a stretch of it, blackened by the fire of 1615. It is included in the tower ticket.
Go down the slope north of the tower. On 4 June 1615, with the castle on fire, Hideyoshi's son Hideyori, his mother and about thirty attendants took refuge in a storehouse somewhere on this terrace. A messenger was sent to ask for their lives. The answer was gunfire. They killed themselves.
A stone marks the place. The bridge beyond it is called Gokuraku-bashi, the Bridge to Paradise.
The lawn west of the inner moat was where Hideyoshi's wife lived after his death, and later the Tokugawa governor. It has three hundred cherry trees and the clearest view of the tower across the water.
On the way out to the south is a shrine to Hideyoshi. It was founded in 1879 by a new government that had its own reasons to honour the man the Tokugawa had erased, and was moved into the castle in 1961.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1583 | Hideyoshi begins the castle | Ming China (1368–1644), the Wanli reign: Matteo Ricci settles in Guangdong; Nurhaci takes up arms |
| 1592 | From here Hideyoshi sends his army to Korea | Ming China sends troops to Korea's aid; in London Shakespeare's first plays are on the stage |
| 1615 | The castle falls to the Tokugawa | The year before Nurhaci proclaims his own dynasty; the second part of Don Quixote is published |
| 1629 | The Tokugawa castle is finished | The last Ming emperor has reigned for two years; the Taj Mahal is begun three years later |
| 1665 | Lightning destroys the tower | Qing China, the Kangxi reign; the Great Plague is in London |
| 1868 | The last shogun flees the castle by night, and it burns | The Meiji Restoration; in China, the Tongzhi reign |
| 1931 | The concrete tower opens | Two months after the Japanese army seized Manchuria; the Empire State Building opens in New York |
| 1945 | The arsenal round the castle is bombed flat; the tower stands | The end of the Second World War |
| 2025 | Hideyoshi's buried wall is opened to visitors | Osaka holds a world's fair for the second time |
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
When the warlord Oda Nobunaga besieged the temple that stood here, one turret beat off every attack. "I would pay a thousand strings of coins for that turret," his soldiers said.
Source: Osaka tradition, recorded in the Edo period
Hideyoshi had bars of gold sunk in the well beside the tower to keep its water sweet.
Source: Osaka tradition; when the well was examined in 1959 no gold was found, and it proved to have been dug by the Tokugawa
Hideyori did not die in the storehouse. The general Sanada carried him out through a tunnel and took him by ship to Kagoshima, at the far end of Japan, where he lived quietly for many years.
Source: A children's rhyme sung in Kyoto after 1615; graves shown in Kagoshima
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. Osaka's official tourism site (osaka-info.jp) and the castle's own site (osakacastle.net), fees and hours as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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