History of the Ōsaka-Kōbe metropolitan area
Ancient and medieval periods
The plain of Ōsaka was settled in Paleolithic times and by about 300 ce was a political centre. Among the many ancient burial mounds in the Ōsaka area is that ascribed to the semilegendary emperor Nintoku; the largest tomb of the Tumulus period, the 5th-century structure is surrounded by three moats and occupies some 80 acres (32 hectares). Ancient Naniwa—in what is now Ōsaka—was the site of palace or capital complexes intermittently from the early 5th to the mid-7th century, but in 710 it lost its position to Nara, the first “permanent” national capital.
When Kyōto became the imperial capital in 794, land and water routes between Ōsaka and Kyōto were improved. The reclamation of the delta of the Yodo River allowed the building of new settlements, including Watanabe, which became a provincial capital and port during the Middle Ages. South of Ōsaka, on the eastern shore of the bay, is Sakai, which had emerged as a port town by the 14th century. There is evidence that, like some medieval European towns, it was self-governing in the 15th and 16th centuries, run by its leading merchants until they capitulated to the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1569. These merchants grew wealthy from Sakai’s lucrative domestic and foreign trade; under their patronage Sakai became a centre of the arts after Kyōto was devastated in the Ōnin War (1467–77). Sakai was also a centre of Christian proselytizing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries; the accounts of Jesuit missionaries tell of the wealth and cosmopolitan flavour of the city at that time.
In 1496—in the midst of a century of civil war—Rennyo, chief priest of the militant True Pure Land (Jōdo Shin) sect of Buddhism, selected a site near the mouth of the Yodo River for a fortress temple. Completed in 1532, this structure, the Ishiyama Hongan Temple, became the nucleus of a major town that was destroyed in 1580 by Nobunaga, after a siege of many years. Nobunaga’s successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, built a great castle on the site with massive stone walls and broad moats; the castle town that developed around it was the origin of present-day Ōsaka. From this base Hideyoshi brought the whole of Japan under his control, and Ōsaka was the seat of national power until his death in 1598.
Early modern and modern periods
The castle and town were badly damaged and depopulated during Tokugawa Ieyasu’s siege of 1614–15, in which he eliminated Hideyoshi’s heir and consolidated his power as shogun. Succeeding shoguns rebuilt the castle and town, and during the rest of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) Ōsaka was a directly administered shogunal city. Unlike other towns of the period, Ōsaka was not a political centre and therefore was not dominated by the samurai (warrior) class. Instead, it became the country’s main commercial city; feudal lords from throughout Japan established warehouses for their tax rice along the city’s canals, and rice was traded actively. Many other goods were traded in Ōsaka—which had some 380 wholesale houses by 1679—and the city became an expanding commercial and manufacturing centre. These activities stimulated the rapid monetization of the regional economy.
As it grew more prosperous, Ōsaka became a centre of the cultural renaissance of the Genroku period (late 17th–early 18th century). Dramatic forms such as bunraku (puppet theatre) and kabuki prospered, and new genres of prose fiction arose, the styles and themes of which catered to the tastes of urban commoners and marked a shift in cultural arbitration away from the samurai class. During the 18th century, however, Ōsaka’s position as cultural leader was lost to Edo (now Tokyo), but the city remained an educational centre, with schools in classical studies and in medicine. In the mid-19th century, when Japan was still closed to most Westerners, the Dutch language and Western science were studied by the Japanese in Ōsaka.
Ōsaka remained preeminent both as a port and as a centre of industry until World War II. Much of the city was destroyed by aerial bombardment during the war, however, and postwar economic growth was focused largely in the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. The communist revolution in China deprived Ōsaka of its important China trade until the early 1970s, while the increasing economic role of the national government tended to encourage industrial location in the Tokyo-Yokohama area.