Expo 70 Commemorative Park

The 1970 world exposition at Osaka drew over sixty-four million visitors and almost everything built for it was cleared afterwards. What survives is the Tower of the Sun: Taro Okamoto's seventy-metre concrete figure with three faces - a golden mask on top, a blank face on the front, and a black sun on the back - which stood inside Kenzo Tange's vast roof structure and was left standing when the roof came down, largely because public feeling would not allow its demolition. The interior, closed for decades, reopened in 2018 by advance booking: inside is the Tree of Life, a branching structure hung with nearly three hundred models of organisms from single cells upward, restored to Okamoto's design. Around it the grounds are now a large park with Japanese and rose gardens, a national ethnological museum and a folk crafts museum.

What you actually see

• The Tower of the Sun - a seventy-metre concrete figure with three faces, from 1970.
• The Tree of Life - a branching interior sculpture hung with models of evolving organisms.
• A cleared fairground - the expo site turned to parkland, with one tower left standing.
• Two museums - national collections of ethnology and folk crafts on the grounds.

When to go

April for cherry; November for colour. Half a day. Book the tower interior ahead.

Honest expectations

The tower interior requires advance booking and sells out; walk-ups are not admitted. Park entry is charged separately from the tower and museums. The grounds are very large and involve a lot of walking. Little else of the expo survives.

Nearby

Minoo Falls is north; central Osaka is south down the monorail and subway.