Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan

Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan opened in 1990 on the Tempozan waterfront of Osaka Bay, and at the time it was the largest public aquarium in the world. Its conceptual and exhibit design came from Peter Chermayeff of the Cambridge Seven Associates practice in the United States. The building announces itself from a distance: a tall block in three bands of colour meant to evoke the union of earth, water and fire, with a mural of fish painted on the outer wall by the designer's father, the English-born designer Serge Chermayeff.

What makes Kaiyukan remarkable is its idea rather than its size. The whole collection is organised around the Pacific Ring of Fire, the belt of volcanoes and ocean trenches that encircles the Pacific, and each exhibit recreates a particular stretch of its shores — a Japanese forest, the Aleutian Islands, Monterey Bay, the Gulf of Panama, the Ecuadorian rainforest, Antarctica, the Tasman Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, the coast of Chile, Cook Strait and the Japan Deep. Visitors ride escalators straight to the eighth floor and then walk slowly down through the exhibits to the fourth, descending as if from the mountains and the surface of the sea into its depths. Some 420 species and around 29,000 animals live in 27 tanks holding about 11 million litres of water.

At the heart of the building stands the Pacific Ocean tank, 34 metres across at its widest and 9 metres deep, with 5,400 cubic metres of water. It is stocked like a slice of open ocean: reef manta rays, scalloped hammerhead sharks, Pacific bluefin tuna and schools of Indian mackerel move through it together, and above them all glide the whale sharks, the largest fish in the sea. Watching a whale shark turn slowly in front of the glass is the moment most visitors remember.

Getting there

Kaiyukan stands in Tempozan Harbor Village in the Minato ward of Osaka, beside the Tempozan Ferris Wheel; the neighbouring city of Amagasaki is about 7 km away across the harbour. It is a five-minute walk from Osakako Station on the Osaka Metro Chūō Line. Osaka Itami Airport (ITM), about 14 km away, has limousine buses to Umeda in about 30 minutes, from where the metro continues to Osakako; from Kansai International Airport, a limousine bus runs to the Tempozan Kaiyukan stop in about an hour.