Kansai / Kinki (Kyoto-Osaka)

The old capital region, and the one that still argues with Tokyo about it. Kansai holds Nara and Kyoto, which between them were the imperial capital from 710 until 1868, and Osaka, which was the merchant capital of the Tokugawa period. That gives the region a claim to almost everything conventionally called Japanese culture: the imperial court, the great Buddhist temple complexes, the tea ceremony, Noh, and the language the classical literature was written in. Kyoto's survival is partly an accident of the Second World War, when it was removed from the atomic target list, and its street grid is still the one laid out in 794 on a Chinese model. Osaka developed differently and deliberately so. It was the kitchen of the realm, where the daimyo shipped their rice tax to be sold, and it built the world's first organised futures exchange at Dojima in the 1730s to trade the crop before harvest. A merchant city with no samurai government produced merchant manners: Osaka speech is famously direct, its comedy tradition is commercial rather than courtly, and its self-image is built against Tokyo's. Kobe, the third city, was one of the treaty ports opened to foreigners in 1868 and is the most international of the three. The region's twentieth-century trajectory has been relative decline, as corporate headquarters drifted east and the 1995 earthquake devastated Kobe. It remains Japan's second economic centre and its cultural senior. The rivalry with Kanto is genuine, old and frequently the subject of national jokes.

• Existed: 700 CE – present
• Type: Entity