Nagoya, Ultra-Short History and a Bird's-eye View

The area of today's Nagoya city was inhabited since ancient times. It is known that the construction of the Atsuta Shrine took place during the reign of Emperor Keiko (71-130) and that the construction of the first castle in Nagoya started in 1521.

The today's Nagoya Castle, ordered by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, was built in 1612 as a residence for the Owari Tokugawa clan. Destroyed in 1945, the donjon was rebuilt in 1959 and the reconstruction of the castle’s palace will be finished in 2018.

In 1886, the Nagoya Station was opened on the Tōkaidō railway line. Today, the Nagoya Station has over one million passengers every day, and Nagoya is Japan's fourth most populated city, with a population of 2,265,864 in 2011, and it is one of the most modern Japanese cities. Here's a bird's eye view of the city as seen from the Midland Square, the highest open-air observation deck in Japan (220 meters).