6 best summer and year-end festivals happening in Osaka in 2025
There's no shortage of festivals to enjoy throughout the year in Japan. Summer is famous for its traditional festivals and fireworks displays, the cooler months are brought to life through colourful illuminations, while excellent art exhibitions take place year-round.
One of the best places to get a taste of all these events is Osaka, where you can enjoy vibrant traditional festivals, incredible light-ups and many other unforgettable experiences. Here are some festivals you shouldn't miss while you're in Osaka this year.
Aizen Festival
When: June 30-July 2, 2025
Where: Aizen-do Shoman-in Temple
The main highlight of Aizen-do Shoman-in's namesake summer festival occurs on the first day, when eight women dressed in yukata are carried in their respective hoekago (literally means 'treasure basket') for a parade along Tanimachisugi street. These women, also known as Aizen Musume, were traditionally geisha back in the Edo period (1603–1867). Today they're selected by the organisers and occasionally include local celebrities.
Tenjin Festival
When: July 24-25, 2025
Where: Tenmangu Shrine
This traditional festival is one of the biggest in Japan, dating back over 1,000 years. It takes place annually in July over two days, with the main events happening on the second day. The festivities culminate with a vibrant parade of mikoshi (portable shrines) carried by devotees in elaborate costumes. The procession starts at the historical Tenmangu Shrine before arriving at the Okawa River. It then continues on boats accompanied by fireworks over the water.
Kishiwada Danjiri Festival
When: September 13-14 and October 11-12, 2025
Where: around Kishiwada Castle
This awe-inspiring festival is a sight to behold, especially with 34 danjiri (massive wooden floats) parading the streets around the historic Kishiwada Castle, a landmark in the southern part of Osaka prefecture. Each float belongs to a different neighbourhood in the city of Kishiwada, and are crafted in ornate details by the residents themselves. Make sure to arrive early to enjoy traditional Japanese street food like takoyaki, grilled squid, yakisoba and more.
Naniwa Yodogawa Fireworks Festival
When: October 18 2025
Where: Yodogawa Park
Summer in Japan is synonymous with fireworks festivals, but Osaka's biggest pyrotechnic display has been moved to October this year to coincide with the finale of the World Expo. The Naniwa Yodogawa Fireworks Festival is held along the Yodogawa River with a spectacular view of the city skyline in the background. The hour-long festival is split into five sections, each featuring a pair of songs played in sync with the fireworks.
Suminoe Art Beat
When: November 9 2025
Where: Creative Center Osaka
One of Osaka's premier art events takes place at the Creative Center Osaka art complex in Kitakagaya and is beloved for its 9.5m-tall giant rubber duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. Additionally, there will be a series of exhibitions, pop-up shops and food stalls as well as performances.
Festival of the Lights
When: November 2025-January 2026
For this year-end celebration, Osaka's most popular landmarks and attractions are lit up in colourful illuminations after dark, especially the Midosuji avenue between Umeda and Namba, which currently holds the Guinness World Record for having the 'most illuminated trees on a single street'. Also, don't miss the Osaka City Central Public Hall, which will serve as the backdrop for a spectacular projection mapping display. Festival of the Lights also sees many other locations across Osaka prefecture lighting up for the occasion, including the Expo '70 Commemorative Park.
This article was originally published on June 26 2023 and updated on June 2 2025.
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Time Out
2 days ago
- Time Out
6 best summer and year-end festivals happening in Osaka in 2025
There's no shortage of festivals to enjoy throughout the year in Japan. Summer is famous for its traditional festivals and fireworks displays, the cooler months are brought to life through colourful illuminations, while excellent art exhibitions take place year-round. One of the best places to get a taste of all these events is Osaka, where you can enjoy vibrant traditional festivals, incredible light-ups and many other unforgettable experiences. Here are some festivals you shouldn't miss while you're in Osaka this year. Aizen Festival When: June 30-July 2, 2025 Where: Aizen-do Shoman-in Temple The main highlight of Aizen-do Shoman-in's namesake summer festival occurs on the first day, when eight women dressed in yukata are carried in their respective hoekago (literally means 'treasure basket') for a parade along Tanimachisugi street. These women, also known as Aizen Musume, were traditionally geisha back in the Edo period (1603–1867). Today they're selected by the organisers and occasionally include local celebrities. Tenjin Festival When: July 24-25, 2025 Where: Tenmangu Shrine This traditional festival is one of the biggest in Japan, dating back over 1,000 years. It takes place annually in July over two days, with the main events happening on the second day. The festivities culminate with a vibrant parade of mikoshi (portable shrines) carried by devotees in elaborate costumes. The procession starts at the historical Tenmangu Shrine before arriving at the Okawa River. It then continues on boats accompanied by fireworks over the water. Kishiwada Danjiri Festival When: September 13-14 and October 11-12, 2025 Where: around Kishiwada Castle This awe-inspiring festival is a sight to behold, especially with 34 danjiri (massive wooden floats) parading the streets around the historic Kishiwada Castle, a landmark in the southern part of Osaka prefecture. Each float belongs to a different neighbourhood in the city of Kishiwada, and are crafted in ornate details by the residents themselves. Make sure to arrive early to enjoy traditional Japanese street food like takoyaki, grilled squid, yakisoba and more. Naniwa Yodogawa Fireworks Festival When: October 18 2025 Where: Yodogawa Park Summer in Japan is synonymous with fireworks festivals, but Osaka's biggest pyrotechnic display has been moved to October this year to coincide with the finale of the World Expo. The Naniwa Yodogawa Fireworks Festival is held along the Yodogawa River with a spectacular view of the city skyline in the background. The hour-long festival is split into five sections, each featuring a pair of songs played in sync with the fireworks. Suminoe Art Beat When: November 9 2025 Where: Creative Center Osaka One of Osaka's premier art events takes place at the Creative Center Osaka art complex in Kitakagaya and is beloved for its 9.5m-tall giant rubber duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. Additionally, there will be a series of exhibitions, pop-up shops and food stalls as well as performances. Festival of the Lights When: November 2025-January 2026 For this year-end celebration, Osaka's most popular landmarks and attractions are lit up in colourful illuminations after dark, especially the Midosuji avenue between Umeda and Namba, which currently holds the Guinness World Record for having the 'most illuminated trees on a single street'. Also, don't miss the Osaka City Central Public Hall, which will serve as the backdrop for a spectacular projection mapping display. Festival of the Lights also sees many other locations across Osaka prefecture lighting up for the occasion, including the Expo '70 Commemorative Park. This article was originally published on June 26 2023 and updated on June 2 2025. teamLab is opening a permanent immersive art museum in Kyoto You can now enjoy gluten-free and plant-based ramen at Expo 2025
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- The Guardian
We're having sex inside Moby Dick! The wild architectural world of Japan's love hotels
Do whales make you horny? How about UFOs? Maybe you've always dreamed of having a tryst in a fairytale castle, or making love inside a gigantic biscuit tin? Whatever your weird fantasy may be, it can probably be catered for on a roadside somewhere in Japan, if a new book on the curious phenomenon of love hotels is anything to go by. French photographer François Prost has been on a 3,000km pilgrimage of passion, driving from Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, to the island of Shikoku in the south, to document Japan's unique architecture of furtive liaisons. What he found spans from manga-embellished motels and Christmas-themed love nests to pastel-hued stage sets worthy of Wes Anderson. And some things stranger than your most eccentric kinks could dream of. 'I find love hotels culturally fascinating,' says Prost, whose previous projects have included photographing the facades of strip clubs in the US and nightclubs in Ivory Coast. 'Japan is generally a fairly conservative society, but these are places of escapism, fantasy and almost childlike wonder. And you find them everywhere.' Estimates vary, but some put the number of love hotels – or rabu hoteru – in the country as high as 37,000. They pop up in city centres and rural villages, at busy highway junctions and secluded among fields in the middle of nowhere. As Prost's photographs show vividly, they come in all shapes, sizes and stylistic genres. Some are modelled on castles, topped with pink crenelations and turquoise turrets. Some look like alpine chalets, others like tiki huts, while plenty are modelled on cruise ships, promising to take you on a voyage to love paradise. Whether French chateaux get your juices flowing or you have a penchant for Arabian onion domes, there's a place waiting for you to be greeted by an anonymous receptionist, pay for a kyukei, or 'rest', and live out your carnal dreams. While most of the buildings in Prost's book date from the 1960s onwards, the Japanese love hotel has its origins as far back as the 1600s. They began to emerge during the Edo period, in the form of discreet establishments known as deai chaya, or lovers' teahouses, where couples could meet away from the prying family gaze. They looked like regular teahouses from the outside, but were designed with secretive entrances and multiple exits, and – crucially, for a shoes-off-at-the-door society – somewhere for customers to hide their footwear so as not to be identified. By the early 20th-century Shōwa era, these teahouses had transformed into themed, colourful places that offered a sense of escape from the daily routine. Japan's postwar economic boom saw love hotels blossom into elaborate sexual amusement parks in the 1970s and 80s, with themes ranging from fairytale to sci-fi to medieval cosplay. The country's high population density, small apartment sizes and tradition of living at home until marriage helped fuel the appetite for places for people to meet in private. Some have also put love hotels' continuing success down to the sexual liberation of women in Japan, sometimes highlighting the cute, cartoonish nature of the decor – designed to feel safe and inviting, rather than tacky and sordid. Quite different from seedy pay-by-the-hour motels elsewhere in the world, love hotels aim to cater to everyone. In his 2005 book, Law in Everyday Japan, legal scholar Mark D West estimated that Japanese couples make more than half a billion trips to love hotels each year, suggesting that as much as half of all sexual intercourse in Japan could be taking place in these establishments. In turn, that would mean that a good deal of the country's population were conceived on a rotating bed, in a beshackled boudoir, or inside a fantastical tropical grotto surrounded by model dinosaurs. Prost's photographs don't take you inside the bedrooms (there are other books for that), but instead focus on the exterior iconography of the hotels. Far from fading into the background, they stand as loud roadside billboards, designed to be easily identifiable by libidinous couples at a glance from a moving vehicle. Who could miss the Hotel Artia Dinosaur, which rises on the corner of a highway intersection in Machida city near Tokyo, crowned with a huge T rex? A tableau of a Jeep being crushed by a velociraptor at the entrance sets the tone. Online reviews warn that the bedroom doors lock automatically once you're inside, and you have to call reception to be let out – a feature common to love hotels, but here adding an extra frisson of danger, in tune with the Jurassic Park-inspired theme. Or might you live out your Moby-Dick fantasy at the huge pink concrete whale of Hotel Festa Qugiela, in Okayama, which waits ready to swallow you inside its grinning mouth? Or embrace the kinky King Kong spirit at the LaLa Resort in Kobe? It features a massive gorilla climbing up its bright red and orange-striped facade, and a model tiger keeping watch over the underground car park (a common feature so punters can be shuttled directly to their rooms). 'The hotels are often designed so you don't have to cross paths with anyone else,' says Prost. 'You can go straight from your car into a lift going up, and there is always a separate lift to go back down, to avoid bumping into people. A lot of the hotels don't even have receptionists any more – you book online, or choose your room from an automatic vending machine.' The faded decor and tatty appearance of many of the establishments makes you wonder if love hotels are becoming a thing of the past. A lot of them have the forlorn look of semi-abandoned amusement parks, with flaking paintwork and sun-bleached signage. And some of the online reviews don't inspire much confidence. Who could resist the lure of Shibuya's Sweets Hotel, a pink battenberg fantasy dripping with huge slices of cake, cookies and plastic icing? It turns out those aren't the only treats on offer. 'I found a pillow with dried semen,' reads one review. 'The walls and doors were covered in scratch marks,' says another, 'more fitting for a murder hotel than a love hotel.' 'This place is gone now,' adds the most recent entry. 'Too bad.' Despite some seedy failures, Prost says that love hotels are still just as popular as ever, and they are evolving to keep up with changing habits. 'Nowadays, many young people go to love hotels to have parties,' he says. 'They have karaoke machines, big TVs, massage chairs and hot tubs – people rent them in groups for a few hours.' The Bali An group, for example, offers big rooms for joshi-kai, or girls' nights out, complete with bars, 75in TVs and eight-person beds. The rooms also come with hammocks and camping equipment. After castles, cruise ships and cartoons, glamping appears to be the latest love hotel design trend, so you can sample the romance of the great outdoors without venturing outside. Love Hotel is out now. The Love Hotel exhibition is at Galerie du jour Agnès B, Paris, until 18 May
Scotsman
23-04-2025
- Scotsman
The Scottish photographer and her otherworldly and evocative Japanese bathhouse pictures
You can almost feel the steam beading on your skin, when you see Soo Burnell's photos of Japan's bathhouses. Healing Waters | Soo Burnell These are the most recent works from the Edinburgh artist, whose equally watery and Wes Anderson-esque subjects have also included Scotland's grand Victorian pools. To experience her most recent 40 images in person, visit Saorsa Gallery in Edinburgh's Stockbridge, from May 3-11, as part of their At the Onsen, In Search of Stillness exhibition. We asked Burnell to tell us more. Why did you decide to visit Japan? I've wanted to visit for as long as I can remember, as I've been fascinated with Japanese culture and the beautiful architecture, shrines and gardens. I was intrigued to dive deeper into the Japanese art of bathing, and to gain a greater understanding of the traditions around bathing and the importance of these healing waters. How long was the project in the planning? This collection took just over a year of planning. I spent a long time researching bathhouses and selecting the ones I wanted to visit. I was connected through friends at website Accidentally Wes Anderson to a wonderful Japanese man called Hiro who assisted me with the entire production, staying with us on the shoots and translating where necessary. I couldn't have done this without him. I was working with incredible models who truly understood my vision. One of the biggest challenges we faced was the heat. We were shooting in November and it was still 30C outside, inside the hot bathhouse was absolutely roasting too, and the water was 42C-46C. It was hard for the models to sit in there for any length of time. We had to get them out to cool down between each shot. But it was a great experience. I loved meeting the families who have owned and run these bathhouses - in some cases for centuries – and hearing their history. I will treasure the memories. What were the seven destinations that you chose? We started in the mountains of Nakkanojō in the Gunma Prefecture, visiting the historic onsen at Sekizenkan before travelling higher into the mountains to shoot at Hōshi Onsen and Tamaki Onsen at Chojukan. We then travelled to Tokyo where I photographed at four very different sento: Goshikiyu, an urban bathhouse redesigned by architect Kentaro Imai; Unsuisen, a traditional sento famous for the twin mural that spans the men's and women's bathing spaces; Mitakeyu, a traditional bathhouse in Minami-Ku; and Koganeyu, a contemporary sento redesigned by architect Jo Nagasaka. The final destination was the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum at Kodakara-yu, and a bathhouse dating from 1929 that was relocated to the museum. What's different about Japanese bathing culture? I was able to ask this question of the owners of a few of the bathhouses, and it was fascinating to learn about the wider context and history. Japanese bathing culture has been rooted in daily life for centuries and it isn't only about the act of bathing. Hot springs such as the onsen at Sekizenkan, Hōshi Onsen and Tamaki Onsen have long been looked on as places for healing the body and mind. Historically, people would stay at an onsen for some time to treat illnesses or injuries. Now they're seen as places for healing as well as for rest and relaxation. Nobuko Ikeda, the owner of Unsuien sento in Tokyo, described how, historically, most homes didn't have baths and sento were an integral part of daily life. They were a local community space where people met with their neighbours and friends. The sento was a place where children learned how to be part of their community. Now, with a younger generation, they are places to relax and unwind from the busy pace of modern life. Why do you think water is so therapeutic, and is that understood better in Japan? I think it's understood differently, given this historic context, whether you're considering the bathhouse as a place of healing or as a place of community. This feeling of community was also my experience when growing up and going swimming in my local pool in Edinburgh. Whether you're swimming or bathing, there's something deeply relaxing about this experience of being in water. It helps you switch off and unwind. The architecture and light are quite different from the Scottish pools you've photographed. Did that give the photos a different feel? There are similarities in the use of pastel colours throughout the interiors, but the architecture is really different. Again, I was working with geometry and blocks of colours, as with the Victorian pools, but then with lots of incredible murals and art that shifted the feel of these spaces. And yes, we were lucky to have some really beautiful soft light to work with. I think that helped create an almost dream-like quality to some of these scenes. Have you exhibited at the Saorsa Gallery before? I held my first Poolside exhibition at Saorsa in 2018 and this collection will be my fourth show there. I love this gallery. It is a fantastic spot right in the heart of Stockbridge in Edinburgh, and I have lots of good memories from the times I've spent there over the years. Is it a selling exhibition, and have you found there's a particular interest in any of the specific photos? Which do people resonate with? It is a selling exhibition and people seem to be really fascinated with this series. I've had an overwhelming response. People are drawn to different things, which I always find fascinating too. Some people love the incredible historic onsens and the mood of these spaces, while others love the pastel tones and those decorative elements I mentioned in the urban sento. Which images are you most happy with? It's hard to separate the work from the experience we had there - the things we saw, the fun we had with our lovely models, and the kindness of the owners of the bathhouses. Creating this collection was possibly the best experience of my life and certainly one I'll never forget. It was about everything: the journey, the beauty of the landscape; travelling up into the mountains to shoot at Sekizenkan and Chojukan, with mist hugging the land and the tall cedar forests that lined the road. There was so much beauty in this entire journey, and when I look at this collection I can remember and feel these experiences all over again. I certainly have a few of my own favourites, including the piece the exhibition is named after, At the Onsen, and also A Room Apart, both of which were photographed in the historic onsen at Sekizenkan. How has your work evolved over the last few years? I am more connected now to what places mean to people, to that sense of nostalgia that comes through in my more recent work. That connection was always there from my earliest Poolside photographs, but it's something that's evolved naturally. I also enjoyed creating characters for the scenes, and I think that's become more evident in recent collections, especially in my work from last year in The Hague, where I was artist in residence at the De Plesman hotel. Where's next, on your global swimming pool adventures? I'm currently planning a big production for the end of this year or possibly the start of next year, but I can't say what it is yet. However, it is going to be another fascinating location, with a different aesthetic, and I'm very excited about it. Saorsa Gallery, 8 Deanhaugh Street, Edinburgh, Related topics: PhotographerEdinburghCultureVictorianDestinationsSpringsPeople
