Nagoya on Foot: Golden Fish, a Canal and the Morning Set

A pair of gilded shachihoko (鯱) — fish-shaped ornaments made for castle roofs — rides the ridge of Nagoya Castle's keep, and the castle's own guide is careful to say they are not identical. The ornament on the north side is male: 2.621 meters tall, 1,272 kilograms. The southern one is female, 2.579 meters and 1,215 kilograms. His body is the bigger, but she carries 126 gold scales against his 112, and because hers are smaller and set more densely, she throws back more light. They went up there, the castle explains, to advertise the power of Tokugawa Ieyasu and the authority of the Owari Tokugawa house.

The keep beneath them is younger than it looks. Air raids in 1945 destroyed the castle's main buildings, the tower among them; work on a replacement started in 1957, and in 1959 the great keep, the small keep and the main gate were rebuilt in steel-reinforced concrete as a project marking the 70th anniversary of the city's municipal administration. That tower is closed at present. What you can walk into stands beside it — Honmaru Palace, also lost in 1945 and rebuilt from 309 measured drawings made in the Shōwa period, some 700 old photographs and 1,049 screen and wall paintings that the fire missed. Its finished rooms opened on June 8, 2018.

A Stone That Kept the Wrong Name

Walk the stone walls at ground level and you reach the Kiyomasa Stone (清正石), the largest block in the castle's masonry, estimated at 10 tons. Its name credits Katō Kiyomasa with hauling it into place. The castle's official site will not endorse that: the daimyō — a regional lord — responsible for building this stretch of wall was Kuroda Nagamasa, and the Kiyomasa story, the site says, was made up in modern times. The stone keeps the name anyway, which tells you something about how a castle town remembers its builders.

The grounds are also where the Nagoya Festival's Hometown Heroes Parade forms up, the event's biggest draw: the region's celebrated trio — Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu — each marching with a company of armored retainers, a boys' fife-and-drum corps at the head and the Ieyasu company closing the line. Partway through, the warriors stage a Sengoku-period battle, and the festival's organizers note that the armor is filled by members of the Ground Self-Defense Force's 35th Infantry Regiment from Moriyama Camp, as work with the community. The roof ornaments turn up here as cake, too: kin shachi-yaki, moist castella-style ningyō-yaki pressed into the shachihoko shape and filled with coarse red bean paste.

Imperial Crown Roofs and the Tower on Hisaya Ōdōri

Nagoya City Hall and the Aichi Prefectural Government Office stand side by side, and both reward a stiff neck. The city hall's main building was completed on September 6, 1933, as a project commemorating Emperor Shōwa's accession and enthronement, in an early-modern manner based on Japanese taste — the style known as teikan, "imperial crown". The prefectural building, put up in 1938, is described as answering the city hall's abstracted tower with a frankly castle-like roof; terracotta tile below, white porcelain mosaic above. The two were designated Important Cultural Properties together on December 10, 2014.

The slim tower over Hisaya Ōdōri Park — Nagoya TV Tower (名古屋テレビ塔), now Chubu Electric Power MIRAI TOWER — came off the drawing board of Dr. Tachū Naitō, a professor at Waseda University who went on to design Sapporo TV Tower and Tokyo Tower. It was finished and opened in June 1954 as the country's earliest consolidated broadcast tower, and when it was designated an Important Cultural Property on December 12, 2022, no other tower in Japan had been. The park below is the main venue of the Nippon Domannaka Festival, which its organizers say grew out of what students and residents thought up and acted on themselves; the festival's stated idea is one citizens make together, with zero spectators — you take part by watching, making or dancing.

Sakae (栄), the shopping and nightlife core, took its name secondhand. A local business association's account traces it to the former town name Sakaemachi, which goes back to residents of Sako Village (栄村) — later the Sakō neighborhood (栄生町) of Nakamura Ward — who came over to open shops here in the Meireki era, 1655–58. The subway arrived much later, and in a single hop: construction began in 1954, and on November 15, 1957 the opening-day train pulled out of platform 1 at Nagoya Station at 9:48 a.m. for Sakae-machi, on a line that followed those of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama.

Indoors, and still in the middle of the city, the planetarium at Nagoya City Science Museum sits under a dome 35 meters across on the inside, among the largest anywhere; Guinness World Records certified that span in 2011. Lunch in the same part of town can be ankake supa, a thick peppery sauce poured over spaghetti, which appeared in Nagoya in the 1960s. The shop that claims the original version, Yokoi, opened in 1963; by its own account the founder worked the rich, spicy sauce out while cooking Western food in a hotel kitchen, then ran an earlier restaurant with relatives from 1961 before setting up alone.

Up the Hori River to Shikemichi

The waterway that made the castle town possible is easy to walk past. Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the Hori River (堀川) cut, and Fukushima Masanori oversaw the digging; the city's account describes a line of some 6 kilometers from the castle to the sea at Atsuta, a road for the heavy freight — timber, stone, roof tiles — that a new castle and a new town consumed. The channel was opened around the time the castle itself went up, in 1610, and the merchants who worked the boats built the quarter now called Shikemichi (四間道). From Nayabashi the water is still there under the bridge.

Shikemichi's name is usually explained by its width. After the great fire of 1700, the official description says, the road was widened to 4 ken — about 7 meters — so that flames could not jump it. The district came through the war with little damage, and earthen storehouses still stand in a row on top of stone walls. In the Endoji shopping street, Kissaten Matsuba carries on a café line that began in 1921, when, as a local account has it, a customer took to dipping toast into sweet bean paste and the owner, watching, started serving the toast with the paste already spread. Matsuba itself opened in 1933, and is reckoned the oldest café still working in the city.

Brick and sawtooth roofs survive on the manufacturing side of town. The Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology (トヨタ産業技術記念館) occupies a weaving factory built in 1911 and an office block from 1925, both renovated in 1994; the city notes that the red brick and the sawtooth roofs keep the face of the old works, and the site took Nagoya's Urban Landscape Award that same year. At Noritake Garden, only the foot of a chimney is left. Built between 1933 and 1940 and standing 45 meters, it lost its upper length when the factory moved out in 1979, and the base was kept as a monument to the ceramics trade.

Money made from kilns went into houses. The city's account of the Shirakabe–Chikara–Shumoku preservation district explains that in the Edo period the quarter held middle-ranking samurai on stipends of around 300 koku — a koku being a measure of rice — on plots of roughly 100 to 300 tsubo. From the Meiji period the area grew as a center of the ceramics business, helped by the transport link to Seto, and from the Taishō years into the early Shōwa period ceramics traders and leading Nagoya businessmen put up both fine Japanese houses and modern Western-style ones. The preservation district still reads as that mixture.

Atsuta, Where the Sword Is Never Shown

Atsuta Shrine (熱田神宮) — a shrine being a place of Shintō worship — keeps as its sacred object Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (草薙神剣), one of the imperial Sacred Treasures. The shrine itself explains that access is strict: not even the Emperor or the chief priest sees it directly. What is visible is the devotion that collected around it. The shrine holds more than 450 swords, of which 20 are designated national treasures or important cultural properties and 12 are designated by Aichi Prefecture, and a selection is displayed at its sword museum, the Kusanagi-kan.

The Nobunaga Wall (信長塀) runs inside the grounds. According to the shrine, Oda Nobunaga prayed here for victory before marching out to the Battle of Okehazama in 1560, won outright, and presented the wall in thanks: earth and lime kneaded hard with oil, with thick courses of roof tile stacked through it. It is ranked with the Ōneribei at Nishinomiya Shrine (西宮神社) and the Taikōbei at Sanjūsangen-dō (三十三間堂) among Japan's great earthen walls. About 120 meters of it survives; the wall once ran some 400.

Elsewhere in the grounds is Nijūgo-chō Bridge (二十五丁橋), an arched drum bridge of 25 flat stones laid in a shallow semicircle — the name counts the stones. When it was built is unknown, though it is thought to have stood in the Kyōroku era, 1528 to 1532. It was dismantled in 1937 and rebuilt in 1955, relocated but with its original stones, and it counts among the oldest stone bridges in Nagoya. The Nagoya Jinku folk song describes the poet Saigyō Hōshi sitting down on it.

Atsuta eats well. Hitsumabushi — grilled eel on rice in a lidded tub — is served to be changed as you go: plain at the start, then condiments stirred through to shift the flavor, then dashi broth poured over so the last of it goes down loose, like ochazuke. The restaurant credited with the dish, Atsuta Hōraiken, opened as an eel house in the 6th year of Meiji, and its account puts the eating method in the Meiji period. Fried chicken wings have a more accidental past: Furaibō, which opened in Atsuta's Hibino in 1964, says the whole birds for its signature Tarzan-yaki failed to arrive, so the cook brushed his secret sauce onto the wings he had in quantity instead.

Kanayama (金山), the junction where lines meet, is named for metal. Tradition holds that Kanayama Shrine began when a man who did blacksmithing and repair work for Atsuta Shrine invited the deity onto his own property; it enshrines Kanayamahiko-no-Mikoto, guardian of mines and metals. Smiths gathered here in numbers and made things, and the place name, by local reckoning, followed from the trade.

Ōsu, a Place Name That Changed Address

Ōsu (大須) is not originally from here. The temple now known as Ōsu Kannon (大須観音) stood in Ōsu Township of the Nagaoka estate in Owari Province — today Ōsu in Hashima, Gifu Prefecture — and the temple's own history records that when Tokugawa Ieyasu took the building and running of Nagoya in hand, he had it moved to this site before anything else, in the 17th year of Keichō, as part of the Kiyosu-goshi, the 1612 transfer of the Kiyosu castle town. The place name travelled with the temple. The ground in front of the gate became the beginning of today's Ōsu shopping streets, and the temple prospered as a great center of the city.

Local specialties are made rather than born, and Ōsu shows some of the machinery. Uirō, a steamed sweet, is old and not only Nagoya's — Odawara among other places has its own — but here it spread because Aoyagi Sōhonke, founded in 1879 with its main shop in Ōsu, began selling it from the platform at Nagoya Station in 1931, then aboard trains after the Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened in 1964. Miso katsu has no single thread: the explanation at Kinshachi Yokochō lines up several accounts, among them that it grew out of dipping skewered cutlets into doteni, a stew simmered in red miso, at post-war food stalls.

Nagoya's Setsubun — the eve of spring in the old calendar — runs on a compass. The city's tourism office explains that once the castle was built, the temples standing at the compass points around it, Arako Kannonji, Ryūsenji, Jimokuji Kannon and Kasadera Kannon, came to be regarded as Kannon guarding the castle, and that blessings follow from visiting whichever lies nearest that year's ehō, the lucky direction occupied by the year's auspicious deity. Kasadera Kannon, founded in 733, is formally Ryūfuku-ji, and the legend behind that name is small in scale: a girl covered a rain-drenched statue of Kannon, the Buddhist figure of compassion, with her own kasa hat; the nobleman Fujiwara no Kanehira noticed her, summoned her to Kyoto as Tamateruhime, and the couple built a hall.

Shibori at Arimatsu, Low Ground at Okehazama

Arimatsu (有松) started as a teahouse settlement on the old Tōkaidō, the highway between Edo and Kyoto, in the gap between the post towns of Chiryū-juku (池鯉鮒宿) and Narumi-juku (鳴海宿), and grew into a shibori tie-dyeing town. Official accounts count 100 shibori techniques worked here, applied to silk, cotton and synthetic fiber, and credit the town with most of the shibori made in Japan. It was named a Japan Heritage site in May 2019. Along the old road the shopfronts still set the techniques out side by side, which is the only way to see how unlike one another they are.

Okehazama Battlefield Park, in Midori Ward, is laid out on ground taken to be where Imagawa Yoshimoto was killed, on the 19th day of the 5th month in the 3rd year of Eiroku. The ward's case for the spot is circumstantial and persuasive: the area has long been called Dangakutsubo; the Shinchō Kōki, the chronicle of Oda Nobunaga, places Yoshimoto's death in low land beside a deep marsh; and the Keichō land survey and a Tenpō-era map agree on the location. Yoshimoto's grave is in the park, along with the spring from which, by tradition, he drew water. Notice how low the ground sits under your feet.

Imaike Mornings and a Word for Being Tired

Imaike (今池) was a horse pond before it was a nightlife district, if the local story holds. A television feature reports an Edo-period irrigation pond called Umaike (馬池), where horses travelling the highway were watered and washed, with the name slurring into Imaike — though a village map from 1846 already writes it the modern way, so other explanations circulate. The neighborhood's other export is Taiwanese ramen. Misen, whose founder came from Taiwan, says the dish began as a staff meal: Taiwanese danzai noodles rebuilt with far more chili, which went on the menu after regulars asked for it.

The local noodles are worth keeping straight. Kishimen, Nagoya's flat udon, was already called that by the later Edo period; a late-Edo text is said to record that the flat noodle known in Edo as himokawa went by kishimen here — the same shape, renamed by geography. Miso nikomi udon is not delicate: its noodles are made from wheat flour and water alone, which is where the hard chew comes from. Fried shrimp, ebi furai, is no Nagoya invention at all; it became a local badge in the 1980s after the television personality Tamori played it on air in dialect as ebifuryā, after which more restaurants here put it on the menu. Aichi made the kuruma prawn its prefectural fish in 1990.

The coffee habit shows up in the statistics. Nagoya's own statistics page, drawing on the national household expenditure survey, puts annual per-household spending on café drinks at 12,768 yen, ranked behind only Gifu City, and counts 3,111 café businesses in the city, with Naka Ward holding the most at 394. The chain that started here in 1968 and now reaches all 47 prefectures, Komeda Coffee (コメダ珈琲店), brings bread with the morning drink; what goes on it is your choice of a boiled egg, house-made egg paste, or the local answer, sweet ogura red bean paste.

By then your legs will have had enough, and the Nagoya word for that is erai — not "eminent", as the standard language would have it, but worn out, done in, off-colour. Say erasō ya ne to someone who looks pale and you are asking after their health, not their standing. It is a useful thing to be able to say at the end of a day spent looking up at roofs.