Maps of Osaka
Osaka in the maps its own library keeps, in order: a coastline nobody had seen, a castle buried under another castle, a map that took four years to cut after it was licensed, and the canals that are now an elevated road.
01 / 14 7th century
A coast nobody had seen
East is at the top1, so the sea is at the foot and the water sits where you expect land. Sandbars2 run across the bay. The only hard ground is the ridge under the pagoda3, twelve kilometres long, never a kilometre wide, standing twenty metres above the silt on either side. Walk east from Tanimachi 4-chōme today and the pavement tilts up onto it.
02 / 14 1615
The castle they buried
Hideyoshi's stonework was not seen again until a shaft sunk in 1959 hit it eight metres down, under the courtyard. Every map from this one onwards shows the replacement, and there is no map of the castle underneath. East is at the top1; the blocks are inked solid black2.
03 / 14 1688
Almost none of it is river
The canal along the southern edge carries its contractor's name. Yasui Dōton started cutting it around 1612 and died in 1615, on the losing side at the siege, before it was finished. Dōtonbori has been called after him ever since.
North is at the top1, the castle on the right2. The fan of narrow strips at the upper left3 is reclaimed ground, laid out at one go, and still the shape of Nishi-ku.
04 / 14 1691 and 1758
The same map, sixty-seven years apart
Same title, same frame, sixty-seven years apart: one shop reissuing its own sheet. The colour has gone, because line alone is cheaper to print. The tables have multiplied to cover distances, temples, offices and ferry fares. The western ground has thickened, where reclamation and canal-digging turned marsh into blocks.
The city has not spread outward between the two printings. It has filled in.
05 / 14 1730
Book rice
East is at the top1, 御城 labelled at the upper left2. Four patches of the sheet are missing3 — paper loss, reading as white cloud over the streets.
06 / 14 1749
Made to be sold
Along the whole foot runs a ruled directory of office-holders1; up the left margin, a key of symbols with the bookseller's imprint under it2. You bought the city and its administration on one piece of paper.
07 / 14 1825
Licensed 1821, printed 1825
That leaves four years and four months between being allowed to print it and printing it, and somebody spent them cutting the blocks.
North is at the foot1: it is printed south-up, and its buyer read it the other way round. The castle is the star-shaped compound at the left2.
08 / 14 1875
New districts over an old grid
Mapping Osaka had been a trade for two hundred years. From the 1870s the government does it instead, for its own purposes. It neither surveyed nor drew the city on this sheet; it coloured in a map of it to record a renaming it had imposed. Nothing on the ground moved.
09 / 14 1888
Nothing in the margins
This is the Home Ministry's survey, both halves on one sheet, the widest plate in the collection and the most finely engraved, with nothing in its margins at all. Inset at the top left, the castle is drawn as a fortification1, every bastion and gate and angle of the walls, at a moment when its grounds held the largest arsenal in Asia.
10 / 14 1912
Every lot in the city
The state had surveyed Osaka three times by then, but at the scale a state cares about, and nobody had described the city lot by lot. Two private publishers did it independently, eleven months apart, in 1911 and 1912, for a city of over a million people in which the difference between one frontage and the next was worth a great deal of money.
11 / 14 1926
Six metres to forty-four
The line it took1 is barely a widening. There is no street under most of it: it crosses every east–west road at right angles2 and runs through the middle of block after block, cutting apart blocks that had been whole since the 1590s. The 1912 survey had recorded every frontage it destroyed, fourteen years before the first ground was broken, and is now the only record of that street pattern.
12 / 14 13 March 1945
Four aiming points
None of the four is in the centre. They sit in the fine dark grain of dense wooden housing around it, and were chosen for how well that would burn. The castle and the arsenal are not circled. The solid black shapes5 are printed on the survey itself, where the army blocked out its own installations before releasing the sheet.
274 B-29s came in low with incendiaries, from 23:57 to 03:25. 3,987 dead. 678 missing. Something like 136,000 houses.
13 / 14 1945–1950
The same nine kilometres
For two centuries a fire in Osaka put a map on sale within days, the burned ground washed brown over the street grid, bought by people who needed to know whether a relative's block had gone. Every major fire since the eighteenth century had one. There is no such sheet for March 1945.
14 / 14 1927, and now
The canals become roads
Four names sit on the same four points in both frames, a century apart. Two are rivers and two are canals. The rivers are exactly where they were. The canals are roads.
By 1950 the canals were doing almost no work, since freight had gone to rail and then to lorries. A canal that carries nothing is a stagnant ditch through the most valuable ground in western Japan, and a filled one is a road that is already straight and owned by nobody who has to be bought out. The Nishi-Yokobori went first, in the early 1960s; the Nagahori was filled between 1960 and 1971. The Nishi-Yokobori and the Higashi-Yokobori are now one elevated expressway, and its loop is the shape of the two canals.