Nagoya City

Even though Nagoya and the greater Chubu region of central Japan comprise the country’s third-biggest metropolitan area, it isn’t the most public transport-oriented compared with its Osaka and Tokyo counterparts. The reasoning is straightforward; before about 1920, there wasn’t much to the city except a few stations on the important Tokaido road linking Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). The turn of the 20th Century brought rapid industrialization to the region, and Nagoya became Japan’s factory for building almost anything that involved mechanization. But then World War II put a gigantic fly into the ointment, and almost every structure in the area was bombed flat over three years. Unlike the other two aforementioned areas, the vast majority of Nagoya’s economy was centered around manufacturing. In the war-time era preceding, this meant most of the factories were churning out planes, ships, and munitions– prime targets for Allied bombing runs. So pretty much everything that is seen in the area these days is all postwar construction, including the street grid itself. Rebuilt for the Automobile With the heady postwar reconstruction economy turning into the miracle bubble of the 1970s and ‘80s, Nagoya kept its “factory megacity” image, and companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nippon…