Namba Parks

Osaka Stadium stood on this block from 1950 to 1998, home of the Nankai Hawks until the team was sold and moved to Fukuoka. When the site was finally cleared, the developers hired the American architect Jon Jerde and asked for something that was not another glass box. What opened in 2003 is a shopping centre with a canyon cut through it and a hillside on the roof.

The garden is the reason to come. It climbs eight levels in terraces, about 11,500 square metres of planting with several hundred species, connected by ramps and stairs so you can walk from street level to the top without going inside a shop. There are lawns, a small vegetable allotment let to local residents, waterfalls and benches. It is free, open to anyone, and treated by people in the neighbourhood as a park rather than a mall roof.

Early morning and just before sunset are the times to be up there. From the upper terraces you look across Namba's rooftops with the Abeno Harukas tower to the east, and the planting is dense enough that the traffic below stops registering.

The shops and restaurants underneath are ordinary mid-range Japanese mall tenants, with a cinema and a food floor that fills at lunchtime. Nobody needs to travel for those.

It connects directly to Namba Station, so it works as a half hour of quiet in the middle of a day in Minami. Dotonbori is ten minutes north on foot and could not be less like it.