Do you know how Osaka residents traditionally greet each other? Simple: “How much money did you make today?”. No, it’s not because there’s a large Jewish community in the city (there isn’t), but because it used to be called “Japan’s kitchen”: in the Edo period, Osaka was the country’s commercial center, the principal place where rice was traded and the world’s first modern exchange market. Osaka’s inhabitants are from father to son, merchant families. This makes Osaka today an incredibly crowded city and more “crazy” than others. I felt it immediately: in Osaka, people are different from those in Tokyo. They are less conformist but, at the same time, more hardcore. They seem more practical and also more “intense”. More fierce.
Osaka (Big Hill, in translation) is Japan’s second-largest city after Tokyo. By size, with a population of 2.5 million, it is the third largest. How far is Osaka from Tokyo? 505 km (about 6 hours by car and about 8 hours with regular train). The modern buildings don’t, at first glance, reveal much history, but the war, which, as elsewhere in Japan, wreaked havoc, must be taken into account. It should be noted, however, that in the 16th century, the famous general Toyotomi Hideyoshi chose the town as the site for his castle.
