Osaka

Osaka has always been Japan's merchant capital — the tenka no daidokoro, 'the nation's kitchen', where fortunes were made in rice and silk and pleasure was never considered a vice. Beneath the neon of Dōtonbori runs an older current: Osaka Castle rising above its moats, the bunraku puppet theatres, a tradition of hospitality warmer and more direct than anywhere else in Japan. Today the city draws principals and founders for reasons both practical and epicurean — it remains the commercial heart of western Japan, and street for street its tables stand among the finest in the world. Osaka works hard, eats beautifully, and apologises for neither.

The Nozomi Shinkansen reaches Shin-Ōsaka from Tokyo in two and a half hours; your chauffeur hands you to the Green Car at Tokyo Station, and another waits at the far end, the Toyota Century idling in the station forecourt. By road, the journey follows the Shin-Tomei and Meishin Expressways — around five and a half hours, best taken in the Lexus LM, with an overnight pause in Kyoto should the calendar allow. Within the city, the Alphard Executive Lounge moves along the Hanshin Expressway's elevated loops with quiet authority, your chauffeur timing each arrival so that no door is ever waited upon. White gloves, silent thresholds, nothing announced.

The Four Seasons Hotel Osaka offers Gensui, an entire floor conceived as a modern ryokan; the St. Regis on Honmachi remains the address of quieter habit. Dinner deserves planning: Hajime, three Michelin stars, asks for patience worth its reward, while Kōryū in Kita-Shinchi serves kappō at a counter of rare intimacy. In mid-April, the Japan Mint's cherry-blossom walk opens for a single week; ask early. Evening calls for Dōtonbori seen properly — from the water, by chartered boat, the neon doubling in the canal. Osaka feeds its guests in every sense, and never once asks them to hurry.