The Uemachi Plateau and Kusaka｜The Places of Good Ki Were Taken First by Those Who Came Before

I love Osaka Castle.

There was even a time, now that I think of it, when I went there 6 days a week, walking and photographing without pause. My daily round was to walk from there along the Okawa River to Tenmabashi, Kitahama, Yodoyabashi and on to Nakanoshima, then from Honmachi down to Minami, or else up to Kita, and once I walked by way of Shitennoji all the way to Tennoji.

Then one day it suddenly struck me that perhaps it was not Osaka Castle I loved, but that I was captivated by this land itself.

Since then I have kept studying the terrain in earnest from the perspective of the ancient past, and in the process I came to understand that the feeling I had then did not begin with me: the Jomon people of the most distant times had felt the same.

No one could imagine it from the great city Osaka has become, but the place where Osaka Castle was built lies at the northern tip of the Uemachi Plateau, and a world of water once spread all around it. This was long, long before the Osaka known as the “city of water.”

To the west of Osaka Castle stretched Osaka Bay, and to the east the Bay of Kawachi. In other words, there was water in every direction from Osaka Castle. Across the sea to the north one could see the Senri Hills, the Itami Plateau and the Tonda Plateau, and across the Bay of Kawachi to the east rose the Ikoma Mountains. In time the Bay of Kawachi became Lake Kawachi, and over long ages the Yodo River delta formed naturally, until the foundations of today’s Osaka gradually appeared.

So “a peninsula surrounded by a world of water” is the true nature of the Uemachi Plateau. Indeed, join today’s Osaka Castle, Shitennoji and Sumiyoshi Taisha on a map, and you see that every one of them was built squarely on that ancient peninsula. Shitennoji once looked out over the sea to the west of its gate, and Sumiyoshi Taisha was the greatest gateway of the ama, the seafaring people. In a sense, the sacred grounds of Shinto and of Buddhism in Osaka sit enshrined on a peninsula: the ancient Uemachi Plateau.

It is only a hypothesis, but whenever I think about Osaka, I suspect that Kita and Minami, the districts that are now the heart of the city, have bad ki (気) because they once lay at the bottom of the water. And I cannot help feeling that the places in Osaka with good ki stood, almost without exception, on the Uemachi Plateau.

Above all, the site of Osaka Castle lay on the main route by which the ancient seafaring people travelled around the peninsula, went straight toward the Ikoma Mountains or into Kawachi, passed near the Kawachi uplands where the tomb of Emperor Ojin and others now lie, and crossed the mountains to advance into Yamato. In other words, it was a strategic point that decided whom to let through. This land carried a history as a strategic point long before Toyotomi Hideyoshi built his castle there.

In fact, Jomon remains have been found at Morinomiya, where Osaka Castle towers, and if you face east from there around the spring equinox, the sun rises right about at Kusaka on Mount Ikoma.

Kusaka is a place once also written 草香. Today it is written 日下 and read “Kusaka,” but these characters are ateji, chosen for their meaning, and what they carry is “beneath the sun,” that is, the land where the sun rises. Kusaka is a remnant of an old place name that hands this meaning down to us today.

The land around Kusaka was also where the Mononobe, foremost among the ancient clans, established their base. According to tradition, Nigihayahi, the ancestral deity of the Mononobe, first descended from heaven onto the land of Kawachi and moved from there to Yamato. The Mononobe extended their power across both Kawachi and Yamato and held overwhelming strength as an ancient clan, and the centre of their advance into the Kinai region was Mount Ikoma.

As if to hand down that prosperity, Nigihayahi, the Mononobe’s ancestral deity, is still devoutly worshipped on Mount Ikoma. And compared with the bad ki within the city of Osaka, the ki of Mount Ikoma is clear even now, and I feel that an entirely different world once existed in this land.

Just thinking about Osaka Castle alone, then, shows that the cities and places that flourish today were not places of good ki since the remote past. If anything, because the places with good ki had already been taken by those who came before, later generations may have had no choice but to build their towns where the water had been, or where the ki was bad, if they were to develop at all.

Even if we try to read the old times, no trace of them can be felt in the landscape of today’s cities and coastlines, massively redeveloped after the war. I myself no longer go anywhere near Minami or Kita, overrun by inbound tourists, but watching from the Uemachi Plateau, they look to me like people who cross the sea on purpose in search of “a pool of bad ki.”

However much the city has changed, I still feel that the bodily sense that grasps good ki by intuition has not changed since the Jomon people of the deep past.