Dōtonbori

Why it matters

The canal is not a river. It was dug — begun in 1612 by Nariyasu Dōton, a local canal administrator, working with three partners. Dōton died in the summer of 1615 during the Siege of Osaka, the same campaign that ended the Toyotomi and settled who would rule Japan; his surviving partners finished the cut that September, and the lord of the new order named both the canal and the street beside it after the dead man. Osaka has been walking along his name ever since.

In 1621 the district was formally designated the city's place of entertainment, and it took to the work. By 1662 Dōtonbori held six kabuki theatres and five bunraku puppet theatres, plus the Takeda Karakuri, a theatre of mechanical automata. The theatres are gone. What remains is the underlying proposition — that this particular few hundred metres is where Osaka goes to be entertained and to eat — and the city has never seen a reason to change it. The local word for the ambition is kuidaore: to ruin yourself through extravagant spending on food.

There is a fine Osakan footnote. The founder is often given as Yasui Dōton, and you will see it on signs. It appears to be a later invention: a 1965 court case, of all things, determined that Yasui Dōton was a fictional character. The district that trades in illuminated spectacle turns out to have had its origin story quietly rewritten too.

What it's like

Ebisubashi, and the sign. The bridge across the canal is the centre of everything, and the thing everyone is photographing from it is the Glico Running Man — a figure with his arms up, breasting a tape. He has been there since 1935; the version you see is the sixth, switched on in October 2014 and lit by LEDs where the earlier ones were neon. He runs because Ezaki Glico's caramel was sold on the claim that one sweet carried enough energy to run three hundred metres.

The signs generally. Dōtonbori's frontages are a competition nobody called off. A mechanical crab works its legs above Kani Dōraku — the restaurant opened in 1962, the crab arrived in 1996 — and there is a pufferfish, a dragon, an enormous hand gripping sushi. The effect is closer to a fairground than a high street, and it is deliberate: this is a district whose business has always been getting you to stop walking.

The canal itself. Below the noise, the Tonbori River Walk runs along both banks at water level, and the crowd thins the moment you drop down to it. The signs reflect and break up in the black water, which is the version of the view worth standing still for.

How to visit

There is nothing to book and nothing to pay. Dōtonbori is a public street beside a public canal, open at every hour, and the whole of it can be walked end to end in ten minutes if you are not stopping — which you will be. It sits five to ten minutes on foot from Namba, Shinsaibashi and Nippombashi stations, which between them carry most of the subway network and the Nankai and Kintetsu lines, so getting here is rarely the problem.

The one ticketed thing is the water. The Tombori River Cruise is a twenty-minute open boat along the canal, which is a genuinely different view of the signs and a good use of a wet evening.

Making the most of it

Come at night and come hungry — the two are the same instruction. Dōtonbori is not a place to eat a meal so much as a place to eat six things standing up, and the local form is to graze along it rather than commit to one table.

Takoyaki is a hometown dish here in the strict sense. Tomekichi Endō invented it in Osaka in 1935 at his shop Aizuya, folding octopus into an existing local snack after seeing how they did it in Akashi. Buy a tray, accept that the first one will burn your mouth, and eat the rest more slowly.

Then leave the main strip. The side alleys south of the canal are where the district stops performing, and Hōzenji Yokochō — two lanes of stone paving and lantern light, a couple of minutes away — is worth the detour on its own. Photographs are easiest before about nine in the morning; the crowd at that hour is nearly nobody.

Nearby

Almost everything worth doing in southern Osaka is within a short walk or one stop. Kuromon Ichiba Market is ten minutes east and is Dōtonbori's daylight equivalent — the same appetite, better ingredients, finished by mid-afternoon. Shinsekai and Tsūtenkaku, two subway stops south, offers a scruffier and more affectionate version of the neon. Hōzenji Yokochō is two minutes away and a century apart. For contrast rather than continuation, Osaka Castle is fifteen minutes by subway, and the Umeda Sky Building gives you the view back down over all of it.