大阪 Ōsaka

The Cult

Ōsaka’s sacred calendar is a merchant’s calendar, and its great rites map the city’s ages. Sumiyoshi Taisha, traditionally founded in the third century and among Japan’s oldest shrines, keeps the Otaue Shinji each 14 June — rice-planting maidens in the god’s own fields, one of the last great agricultural liturgies of a city that was rice before it was money. Shitennō-ji, Prince Shōtoku’s foundation of 593, burned and was reborn so often that its present halls are a 1963 ferroconcrete reconstruction; every 14 January its precinct stages the Dōya-dōya, young men in loincloths scrambling for lucky sticks — an old temple rite with the city’s noise turned up. Osaka Tenmangū, raised in 949 to the deified scholar Sugawara no Michizane, sends its river procession and fireworks over the Dōjima waters on 24–25 July: the Tenjin Matsuri, counted among Japan’s three great festivals, born when the merchant city adopted a scholar’s plague-god as patron. Tradition counts Ikukunitama’s summer festival the oldest in town, and each January the shops of Imamiya Ebisu buy the year’s luck with bamboo branches — the cult of commerce, openly practised.

The Image

Ōsaka was imaged first as heaven’s gateway, then as itself — and the second portrait is the famous one. For a thousand years the city scarcely had a face in art: Naniwa appears in the Man’yōshū as a ford of flowers, and medieval imagination spent itself on the haniwa-guarded mounds of the southern plain rather than on any skyline. The print revolution gave the merchant city its likeness: the Ōsaka sōzu — bird’s-eye woodblock views of the whole town, canals, bridges and theatre districts — circulated from the late seventeenth century, and Akisato Ritō’s Settsu meisho zue (1796–98) fixed its celebrated places in the illustrated-guide tradition that taught Japan what was worth seeing. The nineteenth century added the emblem that now outshines all: Ōsaka Castle’s donjon on its stone sea, rebuilt in concrete in 1931 and again — gilded, moated, floodlit — as the logo of the modern city. The most honest portrait of Ōsaka, though, remains the oldest kind: a map you can live by, drawn in canals.

Afterlives

The city’s transmission runs on two rails — the name, and the image. The name changed hands across the centuries: Naniwa, the “rapids” of the Man’yōshū, yielded to Ōsaka — “great slope”, attested around the medieval temple-and-castle quarter — and the characters were officially rewritten in early Meiji, 1868, from 大坂 to 大阪, as if the old town could be rebranded with a stroke. The image travelled as guide and warning: Edo Japan learned Ōsaka through the meisho-zue picture-books as the place where money moves; the Meiji port, opened to foreign trade in 1868, taught the world the same lesson, and the city incorporated in 1889 among Japan’s first municipalities.

Twice destroyed and twice rebuilt — the Toyotomi fire and the air raids of 1945 razed the merchant quarters — Ōsaka re-imaged itself for the age of mass media with Expo ’70, the first world’s fair in Asia, Tarō Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun its brash new emblem, and UNESCO’s 2019 listing of the Mozu-Furuichi kofun returned the city’s oldest sacred geography to the world map. The nation’s kitchen now exports its self-portrait the way it once exported rice: in bulk, seasoned, and slightly immodest.