Peak Sakura Season in Osaka

Osaka is the third major city we’ve visited on our Japan trip. Like Tokyo, Osaka is known for offering up a lot of colorful, cosmopolitan excitement.

We arrived in Osaka in time for peak cherry blossom blooms. Having left Kyoto too early for the sakura peak, I was worried that Osaka would not be an ideal place to experience it. Luckily, this concern turned out to be entirely unfounded.

We spent our first morning in Osaka strolling through the aptly named “Sakuranomiya Park”. This park along the river bank is home to over 5000 cherry trees, and it’s quite possible that we photographed every one of them.

After a very satisfying cherry blossom extravaganza, we made our way south toward the Minami district to experience all sorts of other strange and wonderful things. Like, a mall with a lot of life-sized action figures.

A “smell museum” in which you walk around smelling things.

Durian is a very divisive smell in our relationship.

Copious street food.

We capped off the day with a riverside beer.

It may just be that I’m getting the rhythm of Japanese cities in general, but Osaka has been my favorite city in Japan. I like its casual unassumingness, its relative compactness, and its ever-so-slight grittiness. On a second trip, I would schedule a few extra days in this cool, chaotic town.