Osaka 2001: Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The city of Osaka, Japan's third largest metropolitan center, lies in the great Kansai Plains area of the main island of Honshu.

Today known as a major industrial center, the city first grew to prominence in the shadow of a castle constructed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi atop the ruins of a destroyed fortified Buddhist temple town controlled by the Ishiyama Honganji sect.

By the early eighteenth century, under the direct control of the ruling Tokugawa family, Osaka had become a major port, the Empire's major rice market and Japan's first truely commercial city.

rice storehouses along the Yodogawa in Osaka

The resulting lively urban atmosphere fostered the activities of a newly rich merchant class whose tastes in entertainment ran particularly to theater and good food.

Woodblock prints from the period often depict three women, each one representative of popular images associated with Japan's three major cities at the time. One inevitably suggested the subdued traditional elegance of the imperial capital of Kyoto; a second, the chic ambiance of the center of Tokugawa power in Edo (the modern Tokyo); and the third, the gaudy exuberance of life among Osaka's merchant class.

As we enter a new millenium, Osaka today remains as representative of Japan's current status as a major economic powerhouse as ever. Less international in many ways than Tokyo, the city also retains a lively and sophisticated atmosphere, one capturing something of the Empire's current "state of mind" as a modern nation state.

In May 2001, in recognition of this, I spent four days wandering Osaka's teeming streets with my digital camera attempting to capture the city's sense of itself at the dawn of this new millenium. The following illustrated remarks represent the fruits of that effort; they are meant to act as an introduction to selected aspects of contemporary Japanese life and popular culture. They have been designed as well to provide a visual sense of time and place as a kind of mental background against which to place further information garnered from additional inquiries into the nature of contemporary Japanese culture and civilization in historical perspective.

Before you begin your exploration, however, please take the time to print out and fill in this survey (to find it, click on the underlined word) which attempts to capture something of your own current "state of mind" prior to your exploration of OSAKA 2001: AT THE DAWN OF A NEW MILLENIUM.