Tokugawa moved Owari’s capital here in 1610
Nagoya, capital of Aichi Prefecture and Japan’s fourth-largest city with about 2.3 million people, owes its layout to Tokugawa Ieyasu. In 1610 he moved the Owari provincial capital here from Kiyosu, and some 60,000 townspeople followed to settle around the new Nagoya Castle.
The site was occupied long before the castle. A Jōmon and Yayoi shell midden lies within the city, Kofun-era burial mounds followed, and Atsuta Shrine is said to keep Kusanagi, the legendary sword among Japan’s imperial regalia. The name may derive from nagoyaka, meaning calm, and the metropolitan region is also known as Chūkyō, or middle capital. Minamoto no Yoritomo, founder of the Kamakura shogunate, is believed to have been born here.
The area produced Japan’s unifiers. Oda Nobunaga made his name at the Battle of Okehazama in 1560, fought just outside the future city, and the two men who trained under him, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, also drew their power from this district. Ieyasu’s new castle was built partly from pieces of Kiyosu Castle, the Hori River canal was dug the same year, and Atsuta became Miya, a waystation on the Tōkaidō road between Kyoto and Edo.
Nagoya became a city in 1889, when it counted about 157,500 residents, and passed a million in 1934. Mitsubishi’s aircraft company was founded here in 1920, and during the Pacific War the city was one of Japan’s three biggest aircraft-building centres. Air raids began on 18 April 1942 and grew into firebombing; the castle, then a military command post, was largely destroyed on 14 May 1945, and its main keep was rebuilt in 1959, the year the Ise Bay Typhoon flooded the city.
Postwar Nagoya returned to heavy industry, hosting firms such as Brother and Toyota Tsusho, and staged Expo 2005 and the 2010 conference that produced the Nagoya Protocol. The city lies on the fertile Nōbi Plain north of Ise Bay. Its sister-city tie with Nanjing was suspended in 2012 after the mayor denied the Nanjing Massacre.
Source: Nagoya
