Osaka vs Tokyo: these differences will surprise you!
515 kilometers, two and a half hours by Shinkansen. And yet, when a Japanese person talks about Tokyo and Osaka, they speak of them as two different countries.
One single cause explains almost everything that follows. Edo — Tokyo's name until 1868 — was a city of samurai: the shogun's capital, organized around a castle, an administration, and a hierarchy that no one questioned. Osaka was a city of merchants, nicknamed 天下の台所 tenka no daidokoro, "the nation's kitchen": the warehouse and clearinghouse of all Japan.
The warrior power left Osaka's merchants alone, because rigid protocol is bad for business. The result: on one side a city that obeys, on the other a city that negotiates. Four hundred years later, everything still stems from this.