大阪万博のあとの大阪Osaka After the Expo

When the Osaka Expo ended, there was an immediate sense that “Osaka’s future ended with it.” At the same time, Nippon Ishin no Kai, a political party that was born in Osaka, has entered the new administration of Prime Minister Takaichi as the Liberal Democratic Party’s new coalition partner and has begun strengthening its advance into Tokyo’s political center. Originally, this party gained momentum through the “Osaka Metropolis Plan,” a proposal to decentralize the overly concentrated political and administrative functions in Tokyo, but outside of its Osaka home base it has little popularity, and in terms of nationwide results it has achieved nothing. Meanwhile, Komeito, long fused with the Liberal Democratic Party through a political relationship backed by Soka Gakkai, a religious organization, split apart. As a result, the Liberal Democratic Party was forced into a position where it could not even maintain national control unless it found a new coalition partner, and in a bitter twist of irony it ended up joining hands with a party born in Osaka.

During the Osaka Expo period, even from my perspective as someone who lives in Osaka, the number of travelers pouring into the city was so excessive that it actually interfered with daily life. If we look at tourism purely from the perspective of “numbers,” it will certainly appear that Osaka’s future spiked upward once, but “numbers” only provoke irritation in the people who live there. In recent years, overtourism has been driving cities and regions around the world into severe conditions, and it should go without saying that the problem lies not in “numbers” but in “quality.” And yet, even as I travel across Japan, I rarely see any real thought given to “quality.” Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo are already collapsing under it, and the kind of rich time we once had — for example, quietly appreciating the autumn leaves in Kyoto — has been completely taken away. For Nippon Ishin no Kai, which measured everything in terms of “numbers,” judged success or failure in those terms alone, and then rode that momentum into national politics, this outcome is extremely convenient. But when we think about the future of Osaka — and especially the residents, not just tourists — there is no question that this prioritization of “numbers” has created a destructive problem. As long as nobody is actually looking at the “people” who live there, maybe nothing can be done. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is no longer just a political question. It has already become an individual, personal struggle.

The Expo grounds are now being dismantled, and on the neighboring artificial island of Yumeshima — reclaimed land — construction has already begun on an Integrated Resort (IR) centered around a casino, which the national government and Osaka Prefecture are treating as the next pillar of tourism. But if Osaka’s future is going to be entrusted solely to this kind of scrap-and-build development — pouring concrete, tearing it down, and building again — then what will be carved into this land is nothing but a tasteless, hollow, heartless image of Osaka. And it is obvious that an IR will not enrich civic life. Despite an intense wave of opposition from residents and civil groups, the Japanese government — which could rightly be called a “concrete state” — ignored the voices of its own citizens and forced the project forward. At the same time, the moment the Expo ended, the construction industry that is deeply entangled with this concrete state immediately began pressuring politicians for the next round of vested interests, and just yesterday, they calmly announced that the construction cost of the Linear (maglev) Shinkansen will increase by 4 trillion yen from the original estimate, to 11 trillion yen. What we are seeing is that foolish people who can only perceive “forms” — physical structures — can, by clustering together from inside and outside the country, actually destroy an entire nation. That strikes me as a distinctly twenty-first century characteristic, and in practice Japan’s destruction is in fact accelerating through exactly this method. At the same time, we also understand that improving “quality” is extremely difficult, and so we are caught between these two pressures. Cities and nations around the world are now searching for their next future within this same bind. As globalization begins to reverse, those of us who live in Japan — an island nation — feel a growing daily resentment toward globalization itself.

So yes, the “future” described above is already on rails. But even so, I cannot just look away while Japan collapses and the Japanese become increasingly impoverished. Recently I have been walking all over Osaka on foot, trying to explore the city’s ancient strata and imagine a future Osaka, and what I keep seeing is that the version of “the future” Osaka Prefecture is pursuing is nothing more than a repetitive scrap-and-build of “forms (concrete).” There is no attempt whatsoever to create an environmental setting — a lived environment of place — that would actually enrich the lives of the people who live in Osaka, or of those who come to Osaka. So here, I want to write down what I’ve been seeing in Osaka over these past few weeks. The core question is this: if we can’t rely on those in power, then where, within Osaka’s tourism future, can we create another world? Right now I am walking across Osaka with that possibility in mind, using the lens of “Ancient Osaka.” I am trying to generate insight about the future by way of the ancient past. Within that, I have also begun watching where today’s travelers are going next — not the ones satisfied with today’s so-called “downtown Osaka,” places like Namba, Shinsaibashi, or Umeda, but the ones who are already moving beyond those areas. One answer is Sumiyoshi Taisha (住吉大社) and Shitenno-ji (四天王寺). In fact, if we think of “Osaka sightseeing that is not just shopping districts,” many people will probably name Osaka Castle, Shitenno-ji, and Sumiyoshi Taisha. When I actually revisited these areas recently, I saw extremely large flows of people, including travelers from overseas. But the sad reality is that in most cases, the travelers do not actually understand what they are looking at in these places, and no one seems to perceive why these sites are historically important at all.

So I would like you, the reader, to consider the following question: What common feature is shared by these three major points — Osaka Castle, Shitenno-ji, and Sumiyoshi Taisha? At first glance, Osaka Castle is the castle built by the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shitenno-ji is the first state Buddhist temple in Japan established by Prince Shotoku, and Sumiyoshi Taisha is a shrine of Shinto whose origins are traced back to myth, so it may seem like there is no connecting factor — you might think of them separately as “Bushi / Buddhism / Shinto.” And they belong to completely different eras. But this is exactly where I want you to think more deeply.

In fact, there is a critically important common point among the three. That common point is “ancient geography.” It is impossible to guess this from the look of Osaka today, which has been overdeveloped, filled in, and forced into engineered land, but for a long span of the ancient past, most of what is now Osaka City was ocean. More precisely, it was a complex “world of water,” with sea, inlets, and shallow lagoon-like inner bays winding deeply inland. Which is to say: most of what travelers now walk through as “central Osaka” — Namba, Shinsaibashi, Umeda — was once seafloor. This also means that the area was originally bad at draining water, which in turn means that “ki (氣),” the flow of vital energy, tends to stagnate there. So historically, city planning had to consider how to circulate that “ki” smoothly. The ones who shattered that entirely were the concrete addicts who built without understanding.

But Ancient Osaka was not just “a big sea.” In roughly the middle of that broad water, a long, narrow peninsula-like ridge of land projected outward. That landform is called the Uemachi Plateau (上町台地). This Uemachi Plateau is the axis you cannot avoid if you want to understand Osaka’s deep layer. What is especially striking is that all three of those major sightseeing hubs — Osaka Castle, Shitenno-ji, and Sumiyoshi Taisha — line up along this Uemachi Plateau. Osaka Castle sits at the northernmost tip of the plateau. Shitenno-ji lies in the central part. Sumiyoshi Taisha stands at the southernmost tip. In other words, the very places that bored travelers — those no longer satisfied with the standard downtown circuit — are now beginning to visit are, all of them, located along the ancient landform that once projected into the inland sea of Ancient Osaka. By their placement on that landform, they transmit to us, across time, the memory of Osaka’s ancient terrain. Put differently: travelers who now feel drawn to go all the way to Sumiyoshi Taisha are, whether they realize it or not, sensing the circulation of “ki,” and are therefore starting to walk along the Uemachi Plateau, where that “ki” flows more openly. I personally call Namba, Shinsaibashi, and Umeda the “lower world,” and I almost never enter. And if you walk from Osaka Castle down toward Shitenno-ji, you will physically feel this: to the east and west of that line, the land suddenly drops into steep slopes like valleys, and the place names along that north-south corridor are “Tanimachi” (谷町, literally “valley town”), reflecting exactly that valley-like geography.

Just by holding this perspective and looking at Osaka again, a vision of Ancient Osaka appears that ordinary tourists cannot see. For people raised on the continent, this is especially difficult to grasp, but island nations — including Japan — have always been directly affected by changes in sea level. Today, in the context of global warming, sea level rise is often described as purely man-made; but that is a view born from people who do not know the character of seas around islands, people who think in purely continental terms. For those of us living in an island nation, the rising and falling of sea levels is part of nature’s logic. In other words, even if you do not reduce everything to human causes, sea levels rise and fall. If you insist on saying it is “all man-made,” then the “Jomon Transgression”

of the Jomon period — a period when sea levels rose significantly thousands of years ago — would also have to be “man-made,” which would mean there were climate activists in the Jomon period. That is absurd. This rise and fall of sea level directly shaped the ancient history of Osaka. In ancient times, Osaka Bay reached much farther east than it does now, extending almost to the foothills of Mount Ikoma, a long, wall-like mountain range that runs north-south along the present border between Osaka and Nara. That vast stretch of inland sea is recorded in the oldest sources as “the Sea of Chinu (茅渟の海),” but as sea levels shifted over time, its naming also changed. When you stand on Mount Ikoma today and look westward (toward modern Osaka City), what you see is an eerie spread of concrete rather than ocean. But in the past, a broad inner sea opened below, the Uemachi Plateau jutted out into it like a peninsula, islands of many sizes dotted the waters, and beyond them lay the great mass of Awaji Island.

To interpret this ancient boundary between “water and land,” the traces of old place names are essential. Place names cannot truly be understood by most foreign travelers, and even for long-term foreign residents of Japan, decoding place names is quite difficult. So let’s look at a few examples. Mount Ikoma preserves extremely important place names that transmit the shape of Ancient Osaka. The most symbolic example is the district called “Kusaka” (日下) along the foothills of Mount Ikoma. Today it is pronounced “Kusaka,” but originally it was read “Hinomoto.” In Japanese, “Hinomoto” carries the nuance of “the place where the sun rises,” in other words, the original source point where the sun comes up in the east. For ancient groups who crossed the sea and arrived in Osaka, Mount Ikoma — as seen from the Uemachi Plateau — marked the far eastern edge of their known world. The world beyond Mount Ikoma, further east, was regarded by the ancient people as an “other world” where the sun rises, a sacred realm. Even Japanese people today would not normally read the characters 日下 as “Kusaka,” but would instinctively read them as “Hinomoto.” Yet “Kusaka = Hinomoto.” That tells us that for certain ancient people, this place represented the farthest east, a sacred point of sunrise, a divine origin. Here, the image emerges of groups devoted to solar worship who were arriving in this ancient Osaka.

In fact, some of the people who crossed into Ancient Osaka did carry solar worship and moved eastward until they ultimately reached this sacred “Kusaka = Hinomoto.” The stage upon which this “movement of tribes who regarded the East as a divine world,” and this “naming of places in honor of the sun,” accelerated was Kawachi (河内). We need to understand “Kawachi” correctly. Today, Kawachi tends to be used to refer to a limited area in the mid-eastern part of Osaka Prefecture. But in ancient times, “Kawachi” referred to a much wider region. Since most of what is now Osaka City was then underwater, and the eastern and southern parts of Osaka were instead dry land, “Kawachi” essentially referred to that entire land mass. Recently I have been walking Kawachi on foot and examining it closely, and what emerges looks like this:

In Kawachi, there are still traces of land use and settlement patterns that go back to the Jomon period. As I mentioned, because most of central Osaka City was under water in ancient times, you don’t find Jomon-period sites there. But Jomon-period remains have been discovered around Osaka Castle, which stands on the Uemachi Plateau, and they appear abundantly toward Mount Ikoma and its surroundings. Simply put, the presence or absence of Jomon-period sites can be taken almost directly as an indicator of what was and was not ancient “Osaka land,” because the Jomon people moved far more fluidly across sea, land, and mountain than is generally imagined. At the same time, from a certain point onward, we begin to see an influx of traces left by newcomers who crossed the sea — migrants we might broadly call “continental arrivals” — whose presence floods in all at once. Through a long and complicated historical process, these populations and their traditions formed Ancient Osaka. Put simply, Kawachi was the crucible in which “the people who had been here originally (the Jomon people)” and “the people who crossed the sea into the archipelago (the Yayoi people and the people of the Kofun period)” brought their cultures, technologies, beliefs, and languages into collision, then gradually fused across long spans of time. Naturally, this also means that struggles for power between these groups often escalated into war.

Because of that, in places that became dry land relatively early, you find not only place names whose roots can be traced back to the Jomon period but also a great many imported sounds and labels from these incoming groups. A place name, in its original function, is the memory of the land itself — an imprint of environment and belief. Which means that Osaka, even in ancient times, already functioned as a “mixed hub,” visible simply from its place names. But we have to be careful not to project modern national identity backward. At that point in time, there was no “Japan,” and there were no “Japanese.” There were simply innumerable tribal groups moving along different large axes. It is impossible to declare any of them “Japanese,” just as it is impossible to declare any of them definitively “Korean” in the modern sense. This is exactly where late twentieth-century nationalism — especially Japanese and Korean nationalism — becomes poisonous. Likewise, we must remember that there was no such thing as “Koreans” in ancient Korea. In some strains of Korean nationalist argument you’ll hear claims like “all of ancient Japanese culture comes from Korea,” but that completely misunderstands ancient history. The reason certain groups in southern Korea and certain groups in parts of the Japanese archipelago could understand each other’s language was not because “Korean culture spread to Japan,” but because specific tribal groups from Northeast Asia moved southward, some stopping in or moving through the Korean Peninsula, and others continuing onward into the Japanese archipelago. These are the people we call the Yayoi people. They understood each other because they were the same people. Which is why, in ancient times, the area around the Genkai Sea — northern Kyushu and southern Korea — functioned as a single cultural zone.

Reading Kawachi’s ancient history correctly is therefore absolutely essential to reinterpreting the ancient history of Japan itself. Why? Because you cannot enter Yamato (大和, the Nara Basin) without passing through Kawachi. This is precisely why the myths speak of “Tenson Korin” (天孫降臨) — the descent of the heavenly grandchild — as if a deity descended to earth from the heavens. If we are going to talk about how Yamato, and eventually the imperial court, came into being, we have to ask where that force came from and how it reached Yamato. Such a system did not just suddenly appear fully formed in Yamato; its path of arrival is essential. And at the core of that path sits Kawachi, where the prototype of that power structure had already formed. The key to that mystery lies in a colossal tumulus in what is now called the Furuichi Kofun Group (古市古墳群): the Konda Gobyoyama Kofun (誉田御廟山古墳), also known as the Mausoleum of Emperor Ojin (応神天皇陵). Emperor Ojin is listed as the 15th emperor, but I believe he represents the first great ruler raised up by multiple powerful tribal groups, especially migrant groups of continental origin. In other words, this is not something that can be analyzed casually. I have personally been throwing every angle of my nationwide research at this question, and even so, this part of Japanese history feels like the single most complex of all.

Right now, nearly all travelers treat Kyoto as the core of Japan’s history and culture. That is an arbitrary mistake. Kyoto is merely a place that became a center of culture and political authority after the year 794, and if you treat that as the center of all of Japanese history and culture, then you erase more than ten thousand years that came before. Why is Kyoto always positioned as “historic”? Frankly, because it only really has about a thousand or so years of recorded history. Put differently, once writing reached Japan and people began leaving written documents, Heian-kyo (the original form of Kyoto) was founded. Naturally, then, the eras after Heian-kyo are more likely to leave records there than anywhere else. That is all. In fact, Kyoto is in some ways one of the thinnest places historically (and originally it was not a place where people could easily live). By contrast, the old Yamato (Nara) and Kawachi (Osaka) vastly surpass Kyoto in historical depth. So why don’t they have the same image? The answer is simple: Yamato and Kawachi formed their historical cores in the era before writing, while Kyoto’s “history” is dominated by the era after writing. Kyoto is rich in “post-literacy history,” while Yamato and Kawachi are overwhelmingly richer in “pre-literacy history.” Shiga (Omi), right next to Kyoto, actually has enormous historical depth as well, and yet somehow Kyoto alone has been fixed in the global imagination as the center of Japanese history and culture. If you enter Japan with that fixed image in mind, you will never be able to read Osaka’s or Nara’s past, and you will never grasp Japanese history in any inclusive sense. Countless foreign visitors have already fallen into this exact trap.

For the early migrant groups who came across the sea and moved through the archipelago toward the east, the “far east” meant Kawachi’s Hinomoto. Because of that, the ancient worship of the sun on Mount Ikoma as a sacred site of sunrise was likely extremely profound, and Japanese mythology is filled with kami and cults that still suggest that deep stratum. In very old layers, the deity of Mount Ikoma is a solar deity. At the same time, we have to remember that those migrants didn’t just leap all the way to Kawachi in a single jump. Along the maritime routes from the west, southwest, and south, they needed ports of landing, negotiation, and temporary residence. Those ports were also military strongpoints. And there was a particular place where an extremely powerful tribal group controlled this “front gate” into Kawachi. That place was Sumiyoshi Taisha.

The true historical character of Sumiyoshi Taisha cannot be understood at all if you think of it as just “a famous shrine in Osaka.” For forces arriving by sea, it was likely the first immense authority they confronted — a kind of “gate” that determined whether they would be allowed to land. Because of that, the maritime people (海人族) who served this area were also militarily capable; they were not simply fishers. In other words, Sumiyoshi Taisha very likely functioned as an international hub in ancient times. If you visit Sumiyoshi Taisha without this context, you will never grasp why it has been so heavily valued, so long revered, and so charged with mythic weight. But part of this is not the traveler’s fault. It’s because the present shrine no longer makes that ancient character visible at all. Since we are talking about “quality” in tourism, this is where imagination — the ability to project yourself into the ancient past — becomes essential.

Originally, the entire western face of Sumiyoshi Taisha — the area west of the current torii gate, which is now paved roads, residential neighborhoods, and train lines — was shoreline, with the sea pressing almost right up to the shrine. But modern landfill projects pushed the sea outward, with the result that the shrine to a sea deity can no longer see the sea. There is no sea breeze, not even a trace of the sea’s presence. Because of that, for people today it is extremely hard to perceive “Sumiyoshi Taisha = the kami of maritime tribes.” Even so, if you reintroduce the ancient terrain, you see that Sumiyoshi Taisha stands at the southern end of the Uemachi Plateau, effectively at the “front gate” of Osaka Bay, an area once held firmly by powerful maritime groups. In other words, in the past, without passing through Sumiyoshi Taisha you could not enter Kawachi — that is, the inland basin of the Yamato River system. And this “Yamato River” in its present course is artificial, created by Edo-period engineering; it is not the original waterway. If we consider the historical fact that political and ritual centrality moved from Kawachi into Yamato, the strategic maritime chokepoint in that process is Sumiyoshi Taisha. The deities of Sumiyoshi Taisha were enshrined by the Sumiyoshi clan, one of the maritime lineages of ancient Japan. In the entrance zone of northern Kyushu and the Genkai Sea, there were three major maritime clans: the Munakata clan of Munakata Taisha, the Azumi clan of Shikanoshima, and the Sumiyoshi clan. They left traces across the Japanese archipelago, but the clan that secured the gateway from Kawachi into Yamato was the Sumiyoshi clan. That is why the Sumiyoshi deities are enshrined at Sumiyoshi Taisha.

So how did these migrant groups actually navigate toward Sumiyoshi Taisha from the sea? We can imagine several principal routes. One is to sail from Kyushu through the Inland Sea, pass by Awaji Island, and then enter Osaka Bay directly from the south. Another is to circle around from Awaji toward the Kii region (present Wakayama), then move northward along the coast toward the Sumiyoshi area. Yet another possibility is to ride the Kuroshio Current along the southern coast of Shikoku, enter along the Kii Peninsula coast, and then likewise move north. Multiple sea routes likely converged in the waters off what is now Sumiyoshi Taisha. Naturally, ancient navigators needed fixed landmarks to avoid missing their approach. This is where lighthouses become important. After walking and re-walking the ancient terrain of Osaka — studying shrines, deities, place names, early history, and folklore all together — I came to suspect that Sumiyoshi Taisha itself may not have served as a lighthouse, but rather that there must have been a kind of lighthouse or navigational marker guiding ships toward Sumiyoshi Taisha. And in fact, there was such a point. It is Hochigai Shrine (方違神社) in present-day Sakai, just south of Sumiyoshi Taisha.

Hochigai Shrine is known for a faith in deities that protect travelers from ill fortune in directions and on roads, and it appears to have served from a very early stage as a “place of guidance,” a point of orientation. The area around this shrine preserves deep traces of early royal authority, symbolized for example by the Mozu Kofun Group (百舌鳥古墳群), and it was one of the first zones to stabilize as dry land. Today, because there is no sea immediately around Hochigai Shrine, it is treated as a shrine of terrestrial direction, but in ancient times this area was on the shoreline. I believe that in its oldest layer Hochigai Shrine also functioned as “the deity that indicates direction from the sea.” For people coming by water, the area around Hochigai Shrine would have been a major target point — a sign that they had reached the threshold just before Kawachi. From there they would proceed to Sumiyoshi Taisha, then, with permission from the Sumiyoshi clan, follow the river mouths inland toward Kawachi and into the basin of the Yamato River. Ultimately, this would bring them to the foothills of the Ikoma mountain range, which forms the knot where Kawachi and Yamato meet. This is why, when you look closely at where the enormous burial mounds of the Mozu Kofun Group (in Sakai) and the Furuichi Kofun Group (in Habikino and Fujiidera) are located, you realize that these tombs only appear in very particular zones that match the ancient character of Osaka I’ve described.

Hochigai Shrine stands in a place that, in ancient geography, was the tip of a cape, and from there you would likely have been able to sight Sumiyoshi Taisha. The place name where Hochigai Shrine stands is “Mikunigaoka” (三国ヶ丘), literally “hill of three provinces,” but what matters for us here is the “oka,” the hill. In other words, the name itself tells us this was elevated ground. If you walk westward from Mikunigaoka for about five minutes today, you arrive in Sakai-Higashi, a built-up urban district, but the path down there is a steep slope. That tells us that Sakai-Higashi was once sea. In fact, to the north of Hochigai Shrine, that is, in the direction of Sumiyoshi Taisha, there is an area whose name preserves the memory of a shallow bay: Asaka. Today it is known as “Asakayama” (浅香山). The “山 yama” — “mountain” — part is misleading. It became a “mountain” because in the Edo period the course of the Yamato River was artificially diverted, and the piled-up earth formed that raised ground. But older records such as those from the reign of Empress Suiko in the Nihon Shoki (compiled in 720 CE), referring to the turbulent period of Buddhism’s arrival, indicate that this place was known as “Asakaura,” literally “the shallow bay of Asaka,” implying a lagoon-like inlet. In other words, this was a navigable water entrance in ancient times. So if we reconstruct the scene: ancient sailors would have used Hochigai Shrine as a maritime guidepost, then entered the shallow inlet of Asakaura, then reached Sumiyoshi Taisha. From there, after securing the Sumiyoshi clan’s approval, they would move inland along the river channels at the river mouth, proceeding into Kawachi. Eventually, they would reach the Ikoma foothills, the junction where Kawachi and Yamato meet. This is why the massive Mozu and Furuichi kofun clusters sit exactly where they do, and not arbitrarily scattered.

What I’ve offered here is only an elementary framework, but that is precisely the point. The future of Osaka tourism after the Osaka Expo is not about creating more traditional photo spots. It is not about stimulating the so-called “night economy.” It is certainly not about counting “numbers.” The real question is whether we can reweave Osaka Castle, Shitenno-ji, and Sumiyoshi Taisha into a single story as strategic nodes along an “ancient landing route of tribal groups,” and then translate the broader network behind them — the Uemachi Plateau, Kawachi, the foothills of Mount Ikoma, the Yamato River, the Yodo River — into something that can be walked as narrative. Nobody will teach you this. Japanese people themselves do not know this. Tourism guides never present this viewpoint. So you have no choice but to cultivate it yourself. But if each traveler cannot begin to approach this kind of future, then Osaka will simply become a place where low-quality foreign visitors multiply in huge numbers, and the daily life of residents will only get worse. And then, to position Osaka as the primary hub for “decentralizing” Tokyo’s core governmental functions — that is almost comical. Osaka’s history is not Tokyo’s history. The tension between West and East, that push and pull, is exactly what has shaped Japanese history at a deep level. Osaka does not need to inherit Tokyo’s political machinery. On the contrary, Osaka’s future should be to steer in the opposite direction: to refuse Tokyo’s accelerating obsession with “forms (concrete),” to instead protect and cultivate the invisible residue that remains after the form is gone — heart, culture, memory. But watching Nippon Ishin no Kai, newly energized in Tokyo’s political arena and racing from Expo to IR to Linear Shinkansen — essentially the endgame of concrete dependency, a vision of a sterile civilization with no inner substance — I cannot help but feel that perhaps Osaka has already reached the end. Sadly, Osaka’s future now looks like this: a showcase city whose residents suffer falling quality of life, swarmed by low-quality foreign visitors, with stagnant, heavy, unpleasant “ki,” marching toward nothing but ongoing destruction until everything is wiped out by the eventual Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake.

Which means that what we truly need right now is not a sightseeing manual that says “Where should I go?” What we need is for each traveler to be able to ask, “Why does standing here allow me to touch the essence of Osaka?” We need people to ask, “What is the Uemachi Plateau? What is Kawachi? What is Sumiyoshi Taisha?” Then we need them to consider: how did routes — by land and by water — pass through Kawachi and continue into Yamato; and why was it that the foundations of the imperial court arose in Yamato after moving through Kawachi? The question is whether we can reinterpret Osaka not just as a modern metropolis, but as the lost maritime capital shaped by sea, as the front gate called Kawachi, and as the movement corridor that leads onward into Yamato — and then share that in a way that each traveler can retrace. Whether we can do that or not will decide the “quality” of Osaka tourism. This is not just about turning heritage into content. It is about whether Osaka can become a city that can properly hand down the memory of its land — in other words, whether Osaka can possess dignity as a city. And if we look within Kansai as a whole, neither Nara nor Kyoto can do this. The reason is simple: Nara and Kyoto have no sea. That, after walking endlessly through these places, is what I have come to believe is Osaka’s last remaining possibility.

If you ever have the chance, I hope you will walk Osaka with even a fragment of what I’ve written here in mind, and move through the city with a perspective different from the mass of tourists.