Edo

Built in 1839 at the north gate of Kaizuka's temple town in Osaka, this merchant house shows staggered gables and a corner cut away by a later road. Registered 2003.

A twenty-square-metre tatami parlour attached to an Osaka merchant house in Kaizuka's temple town, built to front a storehouse that is now gone. Registered 2003.

The genkan at Gantokuji in Kadoma, Osaka, dates from about 1752, the oldest of the temple's four registered buildings. Its karahafu gable marks a formal entrance.

The shoin at Gantokuji in Kadoma, Osaka, is a late-Edo hall and the largest of the temple's four registered buildings. It looks two-storeyed but has a single lofty floor.

This gabled timber house in Higashiosaka was raised in the late Edo period and moved to its present site in 1872. It was registered in 2006 for its landscape value.

Kyarabashi, an 1865 granite bridge on the old Kishu Kaido highway in Takaishi, Osaka, was moved to Takasago Park in 1988 and registered in 2008. Free to visit.

Main building of the Kotanijō museum: a late-Edo home of the Kotani, village headmen. A copper-clad gabled wing meets a tiled reception hall and a stepped entrance.

At the east end of the front row, this late-Edo storehouse, once a rice store and now the exhibition room, is the only one of the five registered as a model of design.

The oldest of the museum's five buildings, this mid-Edo gate is said to have come from the Hakata domain around 1871. Its front has board doors and comb-shaped windows.

Built in 1828, the oldest of eight registered buildings on a Takatsuki farm, this small clay-walled kura joins a row of white-plastered storehouses facing the road.

A 103-meter Edo-period earthen wall on the east bank of the Amano River at Kongō-ji in Kawachinagano, Osaka. Plastered over a stone footing and capped with pantiles, it marks the boundary of a vanished sub-temple quarter.

Jigan-ji's drum tower in Yao, Osaka, dates to the late Edo period. Its offset upper storey with cusped windows rises above the earthen wall beside the main gate.

Jigan-ji's ablution pavilion in Yao, Osaka, covers barely 12 square metres. Carved details date it to the 1660s, the oldest of the temple's five registered buildings.

Jigan-ji's main hall in Yao, Osaka, rebuilt in 1817, is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property. This Shinshu hall is 19 metres wide and centres a temple town from 1606.

Built in 1721 at a Shingon temple in Kawachinagano, Osaka, Jizoji Hondo has a pyramidal tiled roof, a coved coffered ceiling and a celestial figure at its altar.

The Honbo Karamon at Shitennoji Temple in Osaka is an elegant Edo-period Chinese-style gate originally built as the formal entrance to the Gochikoin Hall, where memorial tablets of successive Tokugawa shoguns were enshrined. Featuring Zen-style architecture, exquisite dragon carvings, and Tokugawa hollyhock crest openwork, this gate was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2022. Discover the artistry and history of this rare survivor of the 1945 Osaka Air Raids.

The Sanmon gate of Shinko-ji Temple in Shimoderamachi, Tennoji Ward, Osaka, is a single-bay yakui-mon gate built during the mid-Edo period (1661–1750) and registered as a Nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2008. With its refined gable roof of traditional tiles and outstanding decorative carvings on the beams and rainbow ties, it stands as a precious testament to Edo-era craftsmanship in one of Osaka's most historic temple districts.

The late-Edo priests' wing of a tiny urban temple in Sakai, Osaka, registered in 2002. A townhouse lattice window marks the terakoya where Kawaguchi Ekai studied.

A late-Edo Buddhist hall of just 24 square metres in Sakai, Osaka, registered in 2002. Its palace-form shrine cabinet marks a rare urban Shugendo survival.

A late-Edo gate only 1.7 metres wide in Sakai, Osaka, registered in 2002 as a model of design for the way its curved rafters and low walls order the street.