Heritage Walking
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Nakanoshima & Umeda: Osaka's Island of Rice, Brick and Bridges

From the rebuilt brick of Daibiru and the site of the world's first futures market to a Bank of Japan dome, a donated library, a donated public hall and four stone lions. Nine stops, about 65 minutes of walking and listening, from Watanabebashi Station on the Keihan Nakanoshima Line to Kitahama Station.

This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.

At ~65 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Osaka makes a full-day itinerary.

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Osaka, Japan · ~65 min · 2.3 km · 9 stops

Stops on this walk

1. Daibiru Honkan

A 1925 brick office front, taken down by hand and put back on a 2013 tower.

Look at the brick building in front of you. Dark red brick, pale stone trim, and carved stone around the entrance. It looks like a survivor from the 1920s. In fact the tower above it was finished in February 2013, and the brick walls you see were taken off an older building and put back on, piece by piece. The first Daibiru Honkan opened on this site in 1925. It was designed by the office of the architect Watanabe Setsu. According to the city of Osaka, it opened as the rental office building with the largest floor area in Osaka at the time. For more than eighty years it was a landmark of Nakanoshima. In 2009 it was demolished. The owner rebuilt the site as a twenty two storey tower and chose to recreate the old building on the lower floors. During the demolition about one hundred and eighty thousand bricks were removed by hand. They were reused as the facing of the new building, covering more than ninety five percent of the north and west faces. Much of the stone carving was reused as well. Above the central entrance is the Eagle and Girl, a sculpture by Okuni Teizo. The yellow stone in the walls is Kiryuzan stone, quarried at Takasago in Hyogo Prefecture. The company describes the lower floors as a restoration of the design of 1925. Nakanoshima was the business center of Osaka in the early twentieth century. This building came back as a skin on a new frame. Look up along the brick to the point where it meets the glass. That line is the seam between two centuries of the island. The small green hill beside the building was laid out when the tower was finished, with a brick path to its top and a view down to the Dojima River.

This is a working office building. Look from the pavement and the small hill park beside it, and do not go past the lobby.

2. Festival Hall フェスティバルホール

A concert hall born in 1958, rebuilt inside a tower in 2013, famous for sound that falls from the ceiling.

Look up at the tower in front of you. The office floors rise in glass, but the base is different. The lower block holds a concert hall, the Festival Hall, and the whole tower is named after it. The hall's own history begins in 1958. In that year, by the hall's account, Festival Hall was born here in Nakanoshima. Its opening event was the Osaka International Festival, which became a long-running spring festival at the hall. Musicians praised the acoustics of the old hall with a phrase that stuck, that the sound came pouring down from the ceiling. The old building was not kept. At the end of December 2008 the hall closed so that the block could be rebuilt. In the spring of 2013 the new Festival Hall opened inside this tower. It seats about two thousand seven hundred people. At the main entrance of the tower, a grand staircase covered in red carpet leads up to the hall. The hall is a sign of what this island became after the banks and the rice brokers. Nakanoshima is still a business district, but this block was rebuilt around a concert hall rather than around offices alone. Turn to the river beside you. This is the Dojima River, the northern of the two channels that make Nakanoshima an island. The walk along its bank is public, and the office towers on both sides were built to face it.

The lobby and the red staircase can be seen from the entrance. The hall itself needs a concert ticket.

3. Dojima Rice Market Site

Where rice certificates were traded on paper, the first organized futures market in the world.

Look at the two monuments on the riverbank. The large one is called A Grain of Light, a work by the architect Ando Tadao unveiled in 2018. The smaller bronze, a child playing in rice plants, is from 1955. Between them a plaque marks the site of the Dojima Rice Market. In the Edo period the feudal domains shipped their tax rice to Osaka. It was stored in warehouses around Nakanoshima and sold by auction to rice brokers. The buyer received a certificate, one sheet for ten koku of rice, and the certificates themselves began to be traded. Some covered rice that had not yet arrived, or had not yet been harvested. In 1730 the shogunate licensed two kinds of trading on this bank. One was the spot market in certificates. The other was book trading, in which a standard grade of rice was bought and sold on paper without any rice changing hands. That second market is the reason this site matters. The Osaka Exchange, which placed these monuments, describes Dojima as the origin of exchanges in Japan. It also calls it a pioneer of organized futures exchanges in the world. It had a membership system and a clearing function. Trading was done in the street. When the official session ended, water was sprinkled to drive out traders who lingered. The prices set here were carried to Edo and other cities by runners and by flag signals, and became the benchmark for rice across the country. The market had begun in the early seventeenth century at the shopfront of the Yodoya merchant house across the water. It moved here around 1697 and was finally closed in 1939.

The monuments stand on a public riverside walk and can be visited at any hour. The plaque and the signs here are in several languages.

4. Bank of Japan, Osaka Branch

A 1903 bank by Tatsuno Kingo, its stone face and dome kept through a rebuilding in the 1980s.

Look across the avenue at the grey stone building with the green dome. This is the Osaka branch of the Bank of Japan, the country's central bank, and the older part of it was completed in 1903. The design is by Tatsuno Kingo, whom the bank itself calls the father of modern Japanese architecture. He had studied in London, and the branch follows the classical line of European banks. The bank names the National Bank of Belgium among the models. The entrance porch is in a baroque manner. The outer walls are granite, and behind the granite is a wall of brick. The building you see is not entirely the one from 1903. Between 1980 and 1982 the branch was rebuilt. The old building was kept along the street, and the new offices were built behind it. The bank says the outer walls, the central dome and the triangular roofs on either side keep the appearance of the original. For two centuries this island and its banks were at the center of Osaka's trade in rice and money. The rice warehouses of the domains stood along these banks, and across the water rice certificates were traded on paper. The central bank's Osaka branch stands in that same district. Beside you is Oebashi, the bridge that carries Midosuji over the Dojima River. It has a twin on the far side of the island, and the two were designed together.

The bank is not open to walk in. Look from the pavement across the avenue. Guided tours exist by reservation on weekdays, but they are suspended from late December 2026 to around March 2027 for building work.

5. Yodoyabashi Bridge

A 1935 concrete arch bridge chosen by competition, one of a pair that frame the city hall.

Stand at the end of the bridge and look along the railing. Granite posts and bronze grilles. This is Yodoyabashi, and with its twin Oebashi on the north side of the island it is a national Important Cultural Property. The two bridges belong to the plan that made modern Osaka. In 1921 the city adopted its first city planning project, thirty nine streets and one hundred and fifty seven bridges, to be finished by 1941. The spine of the plan was Midosuji, the avenue you are on. Where it crossed the two rivers, the city wanted bridges worthy of the city hall between them. So in 1924 it held a design competition. Entries had to use the same design for both bridges, a steel reinforced concrete arch, and had to fit the buildings around them. The winner was Otani Tatsuo. The jury wrote that his design had the air of medieval southern Europe in a modern form, with an eastern taste underneath. It praised him for expressing concrete honestly in the style. Work began in May 1930 and both bridges were finished in May 1935. Yodoyabashi is fifty three and a half meters long, with three arches. Oebashi, over the wider river, has four. The bronze grilles have a story of their own. During the war they were taken away for their metal and replaced with wood. In 1987 the city put bronze back. The name plates are in the handwriting of Seki Hajime, the mayor who drove the plan. The name is older than the bridge. It belongs to the Yodoya, the merchant house whose shop stood at the southern end. By the exchange's own account the rice market began there in the early seventeenth century, before it moved across the island to Dojima.

The bridge carries heavy traffic. Stay on the footway, and look at the railings and the arches from the riverside steps on the island side.

6. Nakanoshima Library 大阪府立中之島図書館

A library given to the prefecture by the Sumitomo house in 1904, and still lending books.

Look at the front of the building. Four tall columns with carved capitals, a triangular pediment above them, and behind that a dome. The library itself describes the columned front as recalling a Greek temple, and the domed central hall as recalling a church. This is the Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library, and it was a gift. In February 1900 the fifteenth Sumitomo Kichizaemon, head of the Sumitomo house, made an offer to the prefecture. He would give a complete library building together with a fund for buying books. Construction began in November 1900, and the building was completed in January 1904. It opened that year as the Osaka Library. The architects were Noguchi Magoichi, with Hidaka Yutaka as engineer, both from Sumitomo's own building office. The gift did not stop there. In October 1922 the Sumitomo family paid for the two wings you see on either side. In May 1974 the central building and both wings were designated Important Cultural Properties. So was the ridge tag from the roof raising ceremony of 1903, found inside the building. Earthquake strengthening of the protected parts was completed in December 2014. In the donation inscription, Sumitomo described a prosperous city that still lacked a library. His gift provided both the building and money for books. More than a century later it is still a working library, open on weekdays and Saturdays and free to enter. Look at the materials. The walls are stone, and the dome is set back so that from the street the columns and the pediment carry the whole front.

Free to enter on weekdays and Saturdays, closed on Sundays and holidays. Inside, keep quiet and do not photograph readers.

7. Osaka City Central Public Hall 大阪市中央公会堂

A red brick hall paid for by one stockbroker, who did not live to see it finished.

Look at the brick front with the great arched window in the middle and the domes at the corners. This is the Osaka City Central Public Hall, finished in 1918. The hall describes its exterior as neo Renaissance, and the structure is brick on a steel frame. The money came from one man. In 1911 Iwamoto Einosuke, a stockbroker, gave the city one million yen to build a public hall. A design competition followed, with thirteen entrants. The winner was Okada Shinichiro, who was twenty nine. The working drawings were made by Tatsuno Kingo and Kataoka Yasushi, and construction began in 1913. Iwamoto never saw the building. After the First World War began, the stock market turned against him and he lost heavily. He was urged to take back part of his gift. By the account of the architectural historian Yamagata Masaaki, he refused, saying that for an Osaka merchant to ask for a gift back would be a disgrace. In October 1916 he took his own life, at the age of thirty nine. The hall opened two years later. The building nearly did not survive either. By the 1990s repeated alterations had hidden the original design and the structure had aged. In March 1999 the city began a preservation and regeneration project. The brick walls were kept, and the whole building was set on a base isolation system so that it could ride out an earthquake. The work finished in 2002. In December of that year the hall became the first public hall building in western Japan to be designated an Important Cultural Property. Walk up to the arch. The building is still in daily use for concerts and meetings, and the corridors inside keep many of the original fittings.

The basement exhibition room and designated viewing area are free during opening hours. The exhibition room is open 9:30 to 20:00. When the large assembly hall is not in use, the east entrance may also open for views of the first-floor lobby.

8. Nakanoshima Rose Garden 中之島公園

The first park in Osaka, opened in 1891, with a rose garden added in 1980.

Look at the beds of roses between the paths, with the river on both sides. You are in Nakanoshima Park, and by the account of the Osaka tourism bureau this was the first park in the city of Osaka. It opened in 1891, on the eastern part of the island beyond Yodoyabashi. The park is long and narrow because the island is, a strip of public green with a river on each side. In 1933 the city designated the whole stretch a scenic district under its planning law. The roses are newer than the park. The rose garden opened in 1980, laid out in beds along the island so that you can walk the length of the garden with water in sight on both sides. The park has carried the island's public life for a long time. In its early years it had a noh stage, called the Suiryukan, and what the bureau describes as Osaka's first beer garden. The public hall and the library on the island are counted among its facilities. Look west and east along the water. To the west the brick of the public hall rises above the lawn. To the east the island narrows toward the point where the river divides. Seen from here, the island reads as a single long garden with a few buildings set on it.

The park is open day and night and free. Stay on the paths in the rose beds, and the lawns are for sitting.

9. Naniwabashi Lions

Four stone lions guarding a 1915 bridge, ordered by a mayor for the age of the tram.

Look at the stone lion beside you, and at its partner across the road. Each is one hundred and sixty five centimeters tall. There are four in all, one at each corner of the bridge, two at this end and two at the far end across the island. People in Osaka call this the Lion Bridge. The bridge itself is Naniwabashi, completed in 1915. It was built when the city laid its tram line along this street, Sakaisuji. The city's cultural property records count it among the very few bridges from the tram-building era that still keep their original outward design. The lions were made by the sculptor Amaoka Kinichi, who lived from 1875 to 1924. They were commissioned by Ikegami Shiro, the sixth mayor of Osaka. In 2015 the city designated the four statues as cultural properties, calling them urban art that adorned modern Osaka. One has its mouth open and the other closed, the pairing that guardian figures at shrines and temples share. Look back along the bridge. It crosses both rivers and the whole island between them in one long structure, and from the middle you can see the park laid out below on either side. The streets at this end are Kitahama. The Osaka Exchange, which traces its history to the Dojima rice market, stands just west of this corner.

Kitahama Station is at this corner. The lions stand on a busy pavement, so step aside from the crossing to look at them.