City walk · Namba, Osaka · Japan
Yasui Dōton
c.1533–1615 · a real person
A blunt, warm Osaka merchant of 1615, proud of his ditch, baffled and delighted by neon
Read what Yasui Dōton says
I am Yasui Dōton. I paid men with my own silver to cut a canal through soft ground south of this city, and I did not live to see water run in it. They gave my name to the water and then to the street, and now I understand the street is louder than the water. Walk south with me, from my canal to a tower taller than any castle I ever feared. I want to see what my hole in the ground turned into.
5.0 (1)115 min · 4.8 km · 8 stops · medium
You’re walking this one before anyone at Walk & Tell has. If something looks wrong, tap Report at any stop — we’ll fix it for everyone after you.
Partly shadedBest time to walk: Morning for Kuromon Market, which quietens after 3pm; Dotonbori and Shinsekai are best alive after dark, so a late-afternoon start gives you both.
The walk
A story walk, no puzzles: eleven places strung in one line from the Dotonbori canal to the top of Abeno Harukas. The teller is Yasui Dōton, the Osaka merchant who paid to dig that canal and died in 1615 before a single boat passed along it. On the way you pass a temple alley, a sumo hall, a shrine with a lion's mouth, the city's loudest food market, electric town, and a tower that was meant to reach heaven. It is Osaka's appetite, told by a man who paid for the ditch it all grew beside.
