ABSTRACT
DEVELOPMENT OF OSAKA.-While the peculiarities of Tsunayoshi's administration in Edo earned his Government the contradictory name of Merciful Oppression, the economic system in Osaka made vast strides-so much that one citizen, Yodoya Tatsugoro, lived more luxuriously than a prince with a fief of 1,000,000 koku, and the Shogunate, astonished at this sinister phenomenon, broke up his family by force. Throughout the whole of Japan there were about 300 feudal lords large and small, who all occupied a strategical point, and built a castle, around which people settled and a town appeared; yet the latter depended on the former, and was not necessarily a commercial centre. Osaka differed. Before Toyotomi Hideyoshi constructed his castle it was already a fairly flourishing town called Ishiyama, with the Ishiyama Castle built by the Hongwanji Buddhist Temple around, where farmers and merchants gathered to attend to trade. From the beginning it was destined to be a great flourishing city before it was a castle, town, or a town under the walls of a castle. When Hideyoshi reared the great castle on an unprecendentedly large scale, and made it the centre of all State affairs, commercial, financial, civil, and diplomatic, Osaka made wonderful progress, as it was in the heart of the most civilized, enlightened, as well as enterprising part of the country; and though, of course, the city suffered severely in the first and second Osaka wars, it soon regained its former prosperity under the rule of the Tokugawa Government.
