Osaka Itami Airport Layover: Expocity, ITM

Osaka’s Itami airport sits inside the built-up area rather than out on a bay island, and the monorail leaving from its own door reaches Expocity’s aquarium, a 123-metre Ferris wheel and the park built for the 1970 world’s fair in 18 minutes flat.

NIFREL keeps white tigers and jellyfish under one roof at Expocity

Seven rooms, each built around a single idea rather than a habitat: colour, shape, ability, behaviour. The people who run the city’s big waterfront aquarium built this one as the small, dense version of it, so the tanks are at eye level and the whole thing takes an hour and a half rather than half a day. An adult ticket is around ¥2,400, and it opens at 10am on weekdays and 9:30am at weekends, with last entry an hour before closing. Timed entry through a tours and activities platform scans straight off a phone, which matters more than usual when the clock is a departure time.

The building is two minutes from the monorail exit, which is the argument for coming this way at all rather than into the city. Itami handles domestic flights only, so most people here have already collected a checked bag off one leg and cannot hand it back until the next airline opens its counter.

The Redhorse Osaka Wheel turns 123 metres above Suita

Expocity has had three Ferris wheels in succession, 40 metres, then 85, then the one standing now, which opened in 2016 and is the tallest in Japan. It carries 72 gondolas, all of them enclosed and some with transparent floors, and a full turn takes about 18 minutes. A standard gondola is ¥1,000 and the wheel runs from 10am until 10pm, which makes it the one thing here that still works on a late departure.

A raked gravel garden inside Expo ‘70 Commemorative Park

Osaka held a world’s fair here between March and September 1970 and then kept the ground: 264 hectares of it, a quarter of an hour north of the city, with a 26-hectare Japanese garden laid out inside. The dry section is the part worth the entry fee, a bed of raked white gravel set with dark stones and walled in by maples that turn in November.

Entry is ¥450 for high school age and above and free below that, and it covers the gardens together. Two things are worth knowing before committing a gap to it: the gates close at 5pm, and the park takes Wednesday off. Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun still stands over the old fairground and can be seen from anywhere in the park, but going inside it needs a reservation made by the day before, which rules it out of a same-day plan.

Itami’s terminal roof is an open deck with a fountain on it

The terminal reopened in August 2020 after a four-year rebuild, its first proper overhaul in about fifty years, and the roof is the part travellers actually talk about. The deck runs the whole width of the building on wooden decking, costs nothing, and looks straight down onto the apron and out over Toyonaka, Itami and Ikeda beyond it. There is a fountain along it and a children’s area at one end, and people who are not flying anywhere come up here to walk.

The bus into Umeda takes 25 minutes

Airport limousine buses leave the kerb outside the terminal for the Osaka Station and Umeda area every ten to fifteen minutes, ¥650, no change on the way. The monorail is the cheaper route if you do not mind one transfer: one stop to Hotarugaike and a commuter train from there gets you to the same part of the city in about 29 minutes for ¥420. Either way you arrive at the northern end of things, where the Osaka layover guide picks the itinerary up from the canal district instead.

Allow more than 25 minutes on the way back in evening traffic. The reason a three-hour gap works at all here is the distance: the monorail stop that opens up the aquarium, the wheel and the park is 9.9 kilometres from the terminal, and you can be standing under all three within twenty minutes of leaving the door.