(ENG) What did Toyotomi Hideyoshi do for modern Osaka?

If you take a selfie in front of the massive ancient walls of Osaka Castle today,

you are actually taking a photo of a 400-year-old crime scene cover.

You really are, yeah.

Welcome to The Deep Dive. Today, we are exploring this really fascinating historical research report

titled, The Reconstruction of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Osaka.

And honestly, it just fundamentally shatters the way we think about historical cities.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, usually we treat these places like museums.

Right, exactly. We look at the castle, read the little bronze plaque,

and just assume the city sort of, I don't know, grew there organically,

just a messy accumulation of people over centuries.

We assume it's just a byproduct of time.

But when you look at Osaka through the lens of 16th century Japan,

that organic city looks more like a massive, highly engineered circuit board.

Yeah.

Hideyoshi chose the ruins of the Ishiyama-Hunganji temple to build Osaka Castle.

But he wasn't just constructing a military fort.

He was deliberately shifting the entire center of power in Japan.

Get away from the old guard.

Exactly. Pulling it away from the ancient aristocratic capital of Kyoto

and away from the fiercely autonomous merchant hub of Sakai.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Because we aren't just looking at a standard tourist guide here.

We're looking at how a peasant turned warlord didn't just build a city.

He, well, he weaponized urban planning to mine control a nation.

That's a great way to frame it.

Yeah, Osaka wasn't a natural settlement.

It was a piece of ruling technology.

And over our time together today, we're going to uncover five hidden historical narratives

deeply embedded in Osaka's DNA.

And we're going to reveal the secret physical remnants of this absolute mastermind

that you the listener can actually go out and visit today.

Which is the best part.

It really is.

It is a journey from the sewers below the streets all the way to the temples

reaching into the sky.

And, you know, to understand how Hideyoshi projected his power upward,

we really first have to look at how he controlled the ground

but near everyone's feet.

Right, because you can't build a massive empire if your city is a mess.

Exactly.

You have to manage a massive population boom.

You've got samurai, artisans, and merchants all suddenly cramming into a brand new city.

And with that kind of density comes the immediate deadly threat of disease.

It's like playing some city, but instead of just drawing residential zones,

you force everyone to share a backyard drain so you can like regulate their private lives.

That is exactly what he did.

Hideyoshi implemented what the locals called the Taiko-Kazui Taiko being his retired

region title.

Right.

He mandated this incredibly rigid grid for the city,

dividing it into blocks of about 40 kin.

Which is roughly 72 meters square, right?

Yep, 72 meters.

And he took that grid and applied it directly to the sanitation system.

Instead of putting sewers out in the street, he built these back-to-back

stone drainage ditches right down the property lines behind the houses.

Okay.

So every house had to drain its wastewater backward into this shared,

stone-lined trench.

Wait, wait.

If the state forces your plumbing to be carved in stone exactly 72 meters apart,

they're permanently locked in your property lines.

Yes.

You've just used sanitation to secretly rewrite the tax code.

If we connect this to the bigger picture,

that is exactly the genius of it.

You've hit the nail on the head.

Yeah.

Because in the medieval period before this, land rights were incredibly chaotic.

Just overlapping and constantly disputed, I imagine.

Total nightmare for a ruler.

So this was spatial standardization.

Hideyoshi physically broke those old chaotic land rights.

He forced the citizens into a measurable,

taxable, surveable system.

You cannot hide your property size from the tax collector

when your boundaries are literally carved in stone by the state.

That is so brilliantly evil.

And the engineering behind it was brilliant, too.

He used a technique called nosura zoomi,

which involves stacking unhune natural stones without any mortar.

Wait, that sounds incredibly unstable for a sewer system.

Why wouldn't you want perfectly fitted sealed stones?

Because of hydrostatic pressure,

if you seal a wall completely, the water building up in the soil behind it

during a massive typhoon will eventually just push the wall over.

Oh, sure.

The pressure has nowhere to go.

Right. So by using uncut stones,

the tiny natural gaps act as a built-in drainage system.

The water seeps through without blowing out the trench.

That is why these structures survive for centuries.

I mean, Osaka had these highly functional

physics-defying stone sewers

while cities like London and Paris were still.

Imping chamberpods out of second story windows into the open street.

Exactly.

And for anyone listening who wants to see this engineering marvel,

you're actually can.

If you go to the non-in-bosh areas,

this is right next to Minamiyo Elementary School in Osaka.

There is a special glass viewing window set right into the street.

It's really cool.

Yeah, you can literally look down and see the 400-year-old

uncut stone sewers.

And the best part is,

they're still actively training Osaka's water today.

It's not some dead ruin in a museum.

It's a living piece of Hideyoshi's machine.

It truly is.

But once Hideyoshi had the physical health

and the geographical lair of the city under his thumb,

he faced the next hurdle of state building.

Mine.

He needed capital.

You cannot run a unified national empire

without a thriving economy

which brings us to the ruthless absorption of Sakai.

Yeah, I read this part of the research

and I have to say,

the historical narrative feels a bit sanitized to me.

Oh, how so?

Well, Hideyoshi fills in the defensive modes of Sakai,

which, by the way, was known as the Venice of the East

because of its immense wealth and independence.

Right.

He strips them of their physical defenses

and then just forces all these wealthy merchants

to move to his new city in Osaka.

And the way it's often framed is like,

they just agreed to pack up and leave.

It sounds a bit too polite.

Yeah.

It sounds less like a migration

and more like a mafia protection racket

disguised as a corporate buyout.

Well, consider the alternative from the merchants perspective.

They had watched other autonomous cities

try to resist warlords

and literally get burned to ash.

Oh, true.

No bunaga did a lot of that.

Exactly.

So for the merchants of Sakai,

trading a physical moat for a guaranteed monopoly

in a unified national market

wasn't just yielding to a mob boss.

It was a highly rational, bloodless business merger.

Hideyoshi offered them a compromise

they couldn't refuse.

By creating the Semba District.

Right. He gave them the Semba District in Osaka

and granted them Rakuichi Rakuza status.

Meaning tax-free, deregulated trade zones, right?

Along with massive land grants.

Exactly.

So they lost the political independence of their city,

but they got the keys to the entire national economy in return.

That forced migration is what birthed

what we now call Osaka's merchant soul.

It cultivated this pragmatic business first attitude

that honestly still defines the city today.

But Hideyoshi didn't just want their money, though.

He wanted their cultural capital, too.

Yeah, right.

He relocated major cultural figures,

most notably the legendary team master, Senorikyu.

Because the tea ceremony wasn't just a nice cultural hobby

for a warler to unwind with, it was deeply political.

It's extremely political.

Think about the mechanics of the traditional tea room.

Hideyoshi and Riku popularized the use of the Nijiriguchi,

which is this tiny crawling in entrance.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So you take a powerful, heavily armed samurai warlord,

force him to leave his swords outside

and make him crawl in his hands and knees

through a tiny door into a silent austere room.

That is the ultimate psychological power play.

You strip them of their defenses

and force them into absolute vulnerability.

And in that state of vulnerability,

in a highly exclusive, intimate setting,

national policy was dictated.

The tea ceremony was completely transformed

from a spiritual merchant class practice

into a highly effective tool of state craft.

That's wild.

You know, if you're visiting Osaka today,

you really have to walk through the Samba district.

The grid of the north-south streets,

which are called Suji and the east-west streets,

called Dori,

is the exact layout Hideyoshi forced upon those merchants.

It's unchanged.

And a real hidden gem there is Do Shomachi,

the historical medicine street.

You can visit the Kunishi family residence there,

which perfectly preserves that wealthy merchant legacy.

And I highly recommend taking a short trip south

to the Sakai Plaza of Riku and Akiko

in modern Sakai as well.

Oh, why is that?

It offers a profound, almost melancholic contrast.

You can explore the ghost of the magnificent independent city

that Hideyoshi methodically dismantled

to feed Osaka's rise.

Wow, that's a great tip.

But, you know, wealth buys you monopolies and merchants,

but it doesn't buy you divine right.

No, it doesn't.

In a 16th century society obsessed with aristocratic bloodlines,

a peasant-born warlord with a fat wallet

is still, at the end of the day, just a peasant.

Hideyoshi had a glaring hole in his resume.

He really did.

To be the undisputed ruler, he needed a spiritual rebrand.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

It's like a modern tech billionaire

buying a legacy newspaper to look dignified.

That's a perfect analogy.

Hideyoshi had to hack Japan's religious history.

And he did exactly that with Osaka's sacred geography.

He poured unprecedented funds into rebuilding Shitanoji,

which is a temple originally founded way back in 593

by the legendary Prince Shitoku.

Okay, so a very ancient, very respected site.

Yes, but he didn't just fund a standard renovation.

He mandated restoring the exact ancient Asuka style layout.

Which means the gate, the pagoda, the main hall, and the lecture hall

all had to be perfectly aligned in a single straight line,

completely surrounded by a corridor.

Right.

Sourcing the massive timbers and engineering

in exact 6th century replica in the 1500s

must have been a logistical nightmare.

Oh, it required an astronomical amount of labor and wealth.

But the aesthetic choice was totally deliberate.

This was pure cultural hegemony.

Right. He's making a statement.

By painstakingly resurrecting the architecture of Japan's

most revered ancient figure,

Hideyoshi was positioning the upstart Toyotomi family

as the ultimate protectors and inheritors of ancient tradition.

And doing this in Osaka was a calculated insult

to the Emperor sitting over in Kyoto.

Oh, I see.

He's effectively building a second capital.

He has the raw, secular military power

projecting from Osaka castle.

And he's manufacturing this sacred historical power

radiating from the temples he controls.

Exactly. He completely undercut Kyoto's monopoly

on ceremonial authority.

And tourists walk through Shitnoji

or Sumiyoshi Tai Shita today.

Look at these beautiful structures

and just assume they are a standard ancient relics.

They completely miss the propaganda hiding in plain sight.

Well, if you want to see this propaganda for yourself,

look for specific pieces.

At Shitnoji, seek out the Ishibutai, the stone stage.

Yes, definitely.

And Tsumiyoshi Taisha

look closely at the base of the Sori Bashi,

the famous arch bridge.

Both of those were donated directly by

Hideyoshi's son Hideyori and his mother.

And they miraculously survived the World War Two

fire bombing that destroyed all the wooden buildings

around them.

And they survived modern concrete renovations too.

Yeah.

Touching those stones means touching a political narrative

that has endured for four centuries.

It's incredible, but, you know,

Hideyoshi's ambition inevitably spilled outward

beyond the city streets and temples

into the natural world itself.

Yet to control everything.

Everything.

Osaka is famously a city of water.

But in the 16th century, the Yodogawa River Delta

wasn't this neat navigable harbor.

It was a chaotic, flooding,

extremely dangerous wetland.

Which is a problem.

Because if you want ships to sail smoothly

from the inland capital regions

right to your new economic hub,

you can't rely on a swamp.

No, you cannot.

So the report notes,

he launched the Tyco Sumi Mega Project.

He decides to just like manually reroute

three major rivers, the Yodogawa,

the Kizugawa and the Katsurugawa.

Yep.

How do you even accomplish river engineering

on that scale in the 1500s without heavy machinery?

And how do you enforce a toll booth on a raging river?

You do it with sheer staggering human labor.

Hideyoshi mobilized his subject warlords

forcing them to foot the bill naturally.

Classic move.

Imagine thousands of laborers standing

way steep in freezing mud.

They constructed massive stone dams

called Ishidashi to tame the rapids.

Wow.

And they did this by weaving giant bamboo baskets,

filling them with massive boulders

and dropping them from boats

into the raging currents

just to break the water's force.

It sounds incredibly dangerous.

Yeah.

And then they drove thousands of wooden piles

of Kyuchi into the soft mud

to build up the artificial banks.

Picture teams of men lifting massive wooden mallets

on rope pulleys, dropping them

repeatedly in the mud, all by hand.

Just back breaking work.

They physically walled off the rivers

from the massive ogre pond,

funneling them into artificial,

strictly controlled channels.

And by doing so,

he turned a natural disaster zone

into a golden waterway.

Because once the river is in an artificial channel,

you control the poets.

Right.

Suddenly every single boat carrying tax

rice, timber or trade goats

from the interior of Japan

had no choice but to sail down his monitored canal

right past his tax collectors to reach the sea.

He transformed a chaotic swamp

into a forced toll road.

If the river only flows where he wants it to,

he effectively controls the entire logistics network

of western Japan.

Precisely.

And that massive infrastructure project

allowed Osaka to become the booming

economic center known as the nation's kitchen.

To see the sheer scale of this human labor,

you should actually leave central Osaka

and head to UG City.

Go to the Chizuna Museum where they actually excavated

the ruins of this 400-year-old embankment.

It's a great exhibit.

You can see the stones and the wooden stakes.

But there is an even cooler secret

for when you were walking around Osaka itself.

If you stroll along the modern Yodogawa River,

you'll notice some of the old traditional streets

are elevated higher than the surrounding areas.

Yes.

You aren't just walking up a hill.

You were walking directly on top

of Hideyoshi's buried levees.

His infrastructure literally still dictates

the topography of the modern city.

And this actually brings us to the climax

of our historical dive.

It's full.

Hideyoshi built a perfect machine of a city.

He controlled the earth,

the economy, the gods, and the rivers.

But then he died.

And things went downhill very fast for his family.

Yeah, in 1615, the Tokugawa Shogunate

besieged Osaka Castle.

Hideyoshi's air-committed suicide

as the castle burned

and the Toyotomi clan was completely wiped out.

The Tokugawa takeover Japan,

but they're left with a glaring problem.

What do you do with the ultimate monument

of your vanquished enemy?

I mean, the entire city was built in his image.

Right.

What's fascinating here is they utilized a concept

of the ancient Romans called

Daim nacho memoria,

the condemnation of memory.

They didn't just erase Hideyoshi from the history books.

They applied that erasure physically

to the landscape itself.

They buried his legacy alive.

Wait, wait.

I've seen photos of Osaka Castle.

It's massive.

You're telling me the castle tourist flock to?

Is a giant fake out?

It is entirely a Tokugawa creation.

And we are not talking about sprinkling a thin layer

of topsoil over the ruins, either.

They brought in tens of meters of earth.

The logistics of that must have been insane.

Almost incomprehensible.

The Tokugawa mobilized fleets of ships

and thousands of hand-drawn carts

hauling millions of tons of soil

just to entomb this structure.

They dumped meters of dirt

directly over the scorched ruins of Toyotomi's castle.

And then right on top of that artificial mountain of dirt,

they built a new perfectly symmetrical,

aggressively larger castle.

So when millions of tourists go to Osaka Castle today

and take a selfie in front of those massive,

perfect sheer stone walls,

they were looking at a 100% Tokugawa construction.

Let me get exactly right.

The Tokugawa built those walls

specifically to physically suppress the memory of Hideyoshi.

They wanted people to look up

and only see Tokugawa power.

And it was an incredibly successful campaign.

I mean, for centuries,

everyone assumed the original castle was completely gone,

pulverized into dust.

That changed in 1984.

Oh, wow.

What happened then?

During an archeological dig near the main keep,

researchers dug down through meters of dirt

and suddenly hit something incredible.

The wild uncut stones,

the original Nizurizumi walls of Hideyoshi's castle.

Yes, still standing, hidden in the dark

and still bearing the black scorch marks

from the fires of 1615.

That gives me chills.

It is a profound physical manifestation of history.

And by the way, there's a new Toyotomi Ishigaki exhibition facility

opening in 2025,

where you'll be able to go underground

beneath the current castle

and actually stand in the dirt

and look at those original scorched stones.

Oh, that is an absolute must visit.

Definitely.

We can look back at everything we've discussed today.

The stone sewers locking in the tax grids,

the displaced merchants building a national economy,

the replicated ancient temples,

stealing divine authority,

the hand-driven wooden piles,

rerouting rivers,

and finally, the buried castle.

Osaka is a physical record of Japan's transition

from the chaotic, warring medieval period

to a highly controlled, engineered modern state.

It is a theater of power

where every single street corner and stone wall

was a calculated political move.

So what does this all mean for you?

We've spent this deep dive talking about the rulers.

We explored Hideyoshi building the machine

and the Tokugawa burying it.

But cities aren't just made of stone,

dirt, and warlords.

They're made of people.

Absolutely.

So here's my challenge to you.

Do some sleuthing on your own.

Go down the historical rabbit hole

and look into how the ordinary citizens of Osaka

reacted to living

on top of their beloved founders buried city

during the Edo period.

That's a great question.

Did they just accept the Tokugawa's memory oration?

Did they leave secret codes in their woodblock prints?

Did they pass down subversive folklore,

whispered in those tiny merchant tea rooms?

How does a population resist

when their history is literally buried under their feet?

Find out for yourself.

It is a deeply compelling question.

And, you know, the answers are out there

for those willing to dig into the local archives

and folk histories.

Remember how we started today?

Looking at a city like a museum,

assuming it just grew organically,

I don't think you will ever look at a street grid,

a sewer drain,

or a castle wall the same way again.

I know, I don't.

That organic landscape is a highly engineered circuit board.

And now, you know how to read the wiring.

Thank you for joining us for this deep dive.

Keep diving deep.