Nagoya, Aichi

The morning rush at Nagoya Station moves with a particular efficiency — shinkansen, commuter lines, and the Meitetsu network converging in a knot of escalators and underground passages beneath towers of glass and steel. Step outside and the scale of the city reasserts itself: wide boulevards laid out in the postwar reconstruction grid, the 100-meter roads that give Nagoya its flat, unhurried civic proportions. This is a city rebuilt deliberately, its bones showing.

Older tissue survives in pockets. At Atsuta Jingu, the shrine housing the Kusanagi sword, the approach is dense with camphor and the smell of incense drifting across stone. In Arimatsu, the streets still carry the pattern of the old post town, and the Arimatsu Shibori Festival each year draws out the indigo-dyed textiles that have been produced in that district for centuries. Osu, a few minutes by subway, is something else entirely — covered arcades, street food vendors, the smell of tebasaki and miso-based sauces, the particular noise of a market quarter that hasn't settled into tourism yet.

Nagoya's food culture runs on fermented soybean paste in ways that distinguish it sharply from Tokyo or Osaka: miso nikomi udon, miso katsu, the slow simmer that defines the local palate. Hitsumabushi — grilled eel eaten in three stages from the bowl — is served in restaurants near Atsuta with a matter-of-factness that suggests it belongs to everyday life rather than occasion. The city calls itself, without embarrassment, a kind of grand provincial capital, and that self-awareness is perhaps its most honest quality.