Nagoya

Nagoya's history begins outside the modern centre, at Atsuta, where a shrine said to hold the sacred sword Kusanagi has stood since antiquity beside the old Tokaido highway and the shallow head of Ise Bay. The surrounding province of Owari produced the first of the three unifiers of Japan: Oda Nobunaga, born in what is now Nagoya and later master of Kiyosu, and the peasant-born Toyotomi Hideyoshi, from a village now inside the city.

The city proper was created by decree. In 1610 Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered a great castle built on a bluff above the plain, with stone hauled by allied lords and a keep finished in 1612 under golden dolphin ornaments, and had the entire town of Kiyosu — houses, temples, people and all — moved on to the new grid below it. The Owari Tokugawa, the senior branch of the shogunal family, ruled from here for two and a half centuries, and their collections survive in the Tokugawa Art Museum.

Industry followed the Meiji reforms: ceramics, clocks, bicycles, and the looms of Sakichi Toyoda, whose son turned the family firm to cars in the 1930s. That industry made Nagoya a target, and air raids in 1945 destroyed much of the city including the castle keep. Reconstruction cut exceptionally wide boulevards, among them Hisaya-odori. The keep was rebuilt in concrete in 1959 and the Honmaru palace in wood between 2009 and 2018; the Shinkansen arrived in 1964, and the city grew into the manufacturing capital of Japan.

Nagoya's reputation in Japan is for making things and for holding on to money — an old joke says its families spend nothing except on weddings, which are famously lavish. The self-image is practical and unshowy, and the city is sometimes teased by Tokyo and Osaka for it, which local people repeat with some pride.

Craft traditions run deep across the region: Seto and Tokoname pottery, Arimatsu shibori tie-dyeing on the old highway in the south of the city, cloisonné, and the mechanical karakuri puppets that ride the festival floats of Aichi and Gifu. The same instinct for mechanism shows in the industrial museums, in a large model and model-railway culture, and in the region's engineering schools.

Popular culture is strong here. Nagoya hosts the World Cosplay Summit, its arcades in Osu are a centre for anime and second-hand trade, and the city has produced idol groups and comedians who trade on a broad local accent. Baseball sets the summer mood, with the Chunichi Dragons followed closely, and the July sumo tournament fills the arena for a fortnight; football's Nagoya Grampus play in the prefecture.

Religious life centres on Atsuta, which draws large crowds at New Year, and on Osu Kannon, whose grounds hold flea markets. Manners follow the national pattern — quiet trains, bowing, shoes off indoors — with the regional quirk that people stand on the left of escalators, as in Tokyo but unlike Osaka.

About 2.3 million people live in the city and about ten million in the surrounding Chukyo region, which takes in Toyota, Gifu and much of Mie. It is the manufacturing heart of Japan: Toyota's headquarters and plants lie east and south of the city, with thousands of component suppliers, alongside aerospace, machine tools, ceramics and chemicals, and the Port of Nagoya is the largest and busiest trading port in the country.

The prosperity is quiet and suburban. Households are more likely to own a car than in Tokyo, homes are larger, and the commuter belt spreads across a flat plain of low-rise housing, factories and rice fields. A significant foreign population works in the region's plants, including long-established Brazilian and Peruvian communities of Japanese descent, and Filipino, Vietnamese and Chinese residents; their shops and restaurants are visible in Osu and in the industrial suburbs.

Days run to office and factory hours, with the coffee-house morning set before work and the izakaya after it. Underground shopping streets carry much of the central foot traffic. Current concerns are those of industrial Japan: the shift to electric vehicles and what it means for a supply chain built on engines, an ageing workforce, the long-delayed maglev line to Tokyo, and preparation for a Nankai Trough earthquake.

Nagoya-meshi is one of the few genuinely distinct city cuisines in Japan, and its foundation is hatcho miso, a dark, dense soybean paste aged in wooden vats in nearby Okazaki. It sauces miso katsu, a breaded pork cutlet; it thickens miso nikomi udon, hard-textured noodles simmered in a clay pot with egg and spring onion; and it is brushed on grilled skewers of pork offal.

The city's grandest dish is hitsumabushi: eel grilled over charcoal, glazed, chopped and spread over rice in a lacquered tub, eaten plain, then with wasabi and spring onion, then with dashi poured over as a soup. Tebasaki, chicken wings marinated in a sweet sauce and dusted with pepper and sesame, are the standard izakaya order. Kishimen, flat wheat noodles in a light broth, are sold even on railway platforms, and tenmusu — a rice ball wrapped around a prawn tempura — is the local snack.

Later inventions belong just as firmly to the city: ankake spaghetti, thick noodles in a peppery, starchy tomato sauce; Taiwan ramen, a fiercely spicy bowl topped with minced pork, garlic and chilli; and doteni, pork or beef offal stewed in soybean miso.

Coffee culture is a local institution. Kissaten serve a morning set — toast, a boiled egg, sometimes a small salad, thrown in with the coffee — and ogura toast, thick toast with sweet red bean paste and butter, comes from the same tradition. Shiro noir, a warm pastry under soft-serve ice cream, is the signature of a coffee chain founded in the city.