Things to Do in Osaka, Japan (2026)

Osaka · JP

Universal Monster Live Rock & Roll Show

Tucked into the glitzy Hollywood area of Universal Studios Japan, the Universal Monsters Live Rock and Roll Show turns the park's most iconic movie monsters into a full-blown concert act. For about 30 minutes, Beetlejuice™—the chaotic bio-exorcist from Tim Burton's horror comedy—serves as the show's DJ, hosting a high-energy revue in which Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein™ and the Bride of Frankenstein belt out famous rock numbers with Hollywood-caliber singing and dancing. It is a seated indoor stage show rather than a ride, so no height requirement applies, and it is widely considered one of the park's must-see spectacles. What makes it memorable is the sheer joy of recognition: the monsters who once ruled the silver screen as figures of fear now command the stage with party costumes and well-loved hits, inviting the audience to shout along. Because the setlist leans on rock classics everyone half-knows, the theater feels less like a passive viewing and more like a rowdy live gig with a cast of beloved creatures.

Historical landmark

Osaka · JP

Ihara Saikaku Literature Monument

Tucked into a tidy riverside green along the Higashi-Yokobori River, the Ihara Saikaku Literature Monument (西鶴文學碑) honors Osaka's greatest storyteller of the Genroku era. A polished black-granite stele carries the soaring opening lines of Nihon Ōdai-zō (『日本永代蔵』), the 1692 collection long called Japan's first economic novel, by the writer who turned the bustling merchant city into literature. Saikaku (1642–1693) was born in Osaka and became the defining voice of ukiyo-zōshi, the witty prose fiction of the townspeople, as well as a celebrated haikai poet. The monument was raised on 19 February 1972 by the Osaka Kitahama Senba Lions Club to mark its tenth anniversary, with the inscription chosen by the late Noma Mitsutatsu, a Kyoto University professor and foremost Saikaku scholar, who also wrote the brief biography cut into the stone base. This is a small, quietly literary stop rather than a grand site: an easy detour for anyone following the old rivers and bridges of central Osaka, especially since the riverside park was improved and the stele, relocated slightly north during the 2021 embankment works, now stands more visibly than it once did.

Shinto shrine

Osaka · JP

Mitama Shrine Togu

Goryō Shrine—known affectionately to locals as Goryō-san—is a thousand-year-old ward shrine tucked into Osaka's old merchant quarter of Sembako (Chūō Ward), steps from the glass-and-steel office towers around Yodoyabashi and Higobashi. Its origins are traced to a Heian-period shrine of 850, and over the centuries it became the spiritual heart of Osaka's cloth-and-trade district. The shrine is a place of layered stories rather than grand scale: a rebuilt honden in a rare roof style, a single weathered torii standing alone where a Buddhist temple once bordered the grounds, a scarred-but-thriving camphor 'skin-guarding' tree that survived the wartime firebombing, and the memory of the great Goryō Bunrakuza puppet theater that once flourished on its precincts. Today it draws worshippers for fortune, warding off bad luck, match-making, business prosperity and safe childbirth, and its autumn festival in mid-October is the year's highlight, when a revived boat procession and samurai-style warrior parade bring a vanished world of old Osaka back to the streets.

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Osaka.

Universal Monster Live Rock & Roll Show

Ihara Saikaku Literature Monument

Mitama Shrine Togu

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Osaka.

Universal Monster Live Rock & Roll Show

Ihara Saikaku Literature Monument

Mitama Shrine Togu