Tsutenkaku & Shinsekai

Tsutenkaku is Osaka refusing to be Tokyo: a 108-metre steel tower — the name means "tower reaching heaven," and the swagger is the point — rebuilt in 1956 over Shinsekai, the "New World" district that was launched in 1912 as Osaka's vision of the future (the tower's first incarnation was deliberately half Eiffel Tower, half Arc de Triomphe, stacked) and then let the future happen elsewhere. What survived is the city's most atmospheric time capsule: a neon-crusted grid of kushikatsu joints, retro pachinko halls and standing bars under the tower's legs, working-class, loud, unbeautiful and beloved — the neighbourhood Osakans invoke when they explain why their city is friendlier than anywhere north of it.

The tower observation deck at 87.5 metres is modest by skyline-race standards and better for it: the view is Shinsekai's grid dissolving into the endless low sprawl toward Abeno Harukas and the harbor, and the deck's presiding deity is Billiken — the pointy-headed, grinning "God of Things As They Ought to Be" (an American illustrator's 1908 creation that Osaka adopted with total sincerity) — whose golden statue's worn-smooth soles you rub for luck, joining a century-long queue of the hopeful. The lower floors run cheerful retro exhibits, a slide for those who prefer to exit a tower at speed, and the whole building glows candy-coloured after dark as the neighbourhood's lighthouse.

The real attraction is the pairing of deck and streets. Kushikatsu — skewers battered, fried and dipped in communal sauce — was invented here, and the district enforces its one commandment (no double-dipping; the cabbage is your scoop) with religious cheer; Daruma is the storied original, the queue moves, and everything on a stick is the correct order. Janjan Yokocho alley adds shogi parlours and 60-year-old standing bars; the smart Osaka evening runs Tsutenkaku at dusk for the lit-up view, then eats its way back to the station. Timed entry tickets skip the weekend queue, the tower keeps late hours, and Shinsekai is safe, scruffy and best met hungry — it is the cheapest great night out in urban Japan, with a lucky god's blessing thrown in.