LaLaport EXPOCITY

A shopping and entertainment complex on the site of Expo '70, the World's Fair that brought 64 million people to Suita and remade this part of Osaka. It opened in 2015 on what had been the fairground car park, and it works best when treated as one half of a day that includes the park next door.

The mall itself is a large LaLaport: several hundred shops, a cinema, food. What draws people from outside Osaka is the collection of attractions attached to it. The Osaka Wheel is 123 metres tall, among the tallest ferris wheels in Japan, and some of its gondolas have transparent floors. Nifrel, built by the team behind the Kaiyukan aquarium, is neither an aquarium nor a zoo but a sequence of rooms organised around qualities: colour, shape, movement, so a room of white animals is followed by a room of things that shine.

The real attraction is over the footbridge. The Expo '70 Commemorative Park holds Okamoto Taro's Tower of the Sun, a 70-metre concrete figure with three faces that was the symbol of the fair and remains one of the strangest objects in Japan. Its interior, sealed for decades, reopened to the public in 2018 with the original Tree of Life inside, and entry requires a reservation made in advance.

The park also has a large and serious Japanese garden built for the Expo, which almost nobody visits and which is worth more time than the mall.

Take the Osaka monorail to Banpaku-kinen-koen. Weekends are extremely busy and the ferris wheel queues.