The Free City of Sakai

The Free City of Sakai in the Sengoku era: a council of merchants, a moat, credit, warehouses, and trade with China and the Ryūkyū Kingdom. How a port without an army negotiated with Nobunaga and lived by tea.

Credit versus the spear

Japan of the Sengoku era: flooded by an ocean of blood from fratricidal wars, filled with the smoke of burned villages and the sobbing of women and orphans. In such a world, power usually belongs to whoever has more men with spears. And yet, on the shore of Osaka-wan Bay, there existed a place that built its prestige on something entirely different. Sakai — a free city of merchants — looked like an anomaly: instead of clan banners, seals, contracts, and reputation mattered more; instead of martial glory — delivery deadlines and the credibility of credit. This was not romantic freedom, shouted from the walls. It was everyday freedom, painstakingly earned: from taxes, from discipline, from logistics, and from a wise distrust of the world.

A merchant loves borders not because they are beautiful, but because they are useful. Sakai lived on the border of provinces and jurisdictions, at the junction of roads to Kyoto, Nara, and Kumano, in a place where a border was not a wall but a fissure — through which one could carry goods, information, and profit. The city had a moat — not to pretend it was a castle, but to draw a clear line: “here another man’s war ends, and our business begins.” “If you want to wage war — leave. If you want to make money — come in and try!” Over that line stood a council of wealthy townsmen, with a rotating administration, as if power were a duty rather than spoils (a radical idea in medieval Japan). Sakai was not “without levies” — it was rather organized so as to bind warriors with credit, because in return it gained a margin of self-government. And that is why it functioned like an exchange of its age: not only commercial, but political — here news of a battle was a signal for the market; here a warehouse was a lever of time; and high-interest credit was a tool for binding people more effective than a sword.

In Sengoku, violence is the basic instrument, but economic pragmatism can matter more: if you want money and supplies, you do not burn the port that provides them — that is why Sakai could reach an understanding with Nobunaga, even when his shadow fell upon the city. At the same time, Sakai brought in aromatics and raw materials through Ryūkyū, drew goods from China into its networks, and in its workshops spun up the future: steel, gunpowder, tanegashima, woodblock printing, textiles — the entire artisanal heart of the country. And when the outside world thickened with suspicion, inside small tea pavilions another politics was being born: disarmament, silence, a shared bowl — diplomacy that needed no army, only a ritual of trust. Today we will enter the free city of Sakai — enterprising Japanese of the sixteenth century, who built for centuries in the name of profit while the rest of Japan, at that very time, destroyed and killed in the name of honor.

12th year of the Eiroku era (1569, Sengoku)

By the road from the side of Osaka-wan Bay, the earth smells of wet sand and smoke, and the wind carries salty dampness mixed with tar used to coat hulls. Only an hour ago we were passing burned fields, cut-down villages, massacres and nightmares of which the human race is capable. We were passing them on our way to our asylum and deliverance — the free city of Sakai — roadside chapels where someone had left fresh incense sticks, as if scent could make us forget what our eyes had seen. Sengoku does not end abruptly; it clings to a person like ash after a fire. And yet, as we draw nearer to Sakai, we begin to feel something else: a rhythm of work that is not the march of an army, but the pulse of a port. A free, busy, trading port.

First, you can hear the city before you see it. Not alarm bells, not the drums of ashigaru, not the sobbing of women — all that to which we have grown accustomed living in Sengoku Japan — but polyphony: the calls of porters, the laughter of boys running with buckets, the tapping of carpenters’ hammers, the creak of carts on wooden wheels, a metallic clank in a smithy where heated steel hisses when someone pours water over it. Someone shouts the price of rice, someone else counts coins under an awning, and from deeper in the street comes the monotonous chant of a craftsman who has worked so long that the rhythm of his voice has become a measure of time. Above it all floats a smell: grilled fish, freshly planed wood, charcoal, oil, incense, and — most surprising of all — the smell of paper and ink, because Sakai lives by information as much as by goods.

We enter the bounds of a city people call “free” not because it has no rules, but because its rules do not drip with blood from a sword, but flow in words from the city council. Sakai is compact, practical, designed for movement: warehouses close to the port, workshops where water is easy to get, merchant houses with façades neat though not frivolous — as if ostentation were risk, and risk too expensive a commodity. For safety and for clarity of boundaries, the city is surrounded by a moat: a band of water that tells the newcomer, “here another man’s wars end, and our business begins.” “If you want to wage war — leave. If you want to make money — come in and try!” The inner circuit — roughly one kilometer in width and three kilometers in length of unbelievably dense, for the Middle Ages, development — is like the frame of a painting, within which everything has its order.

Along one of the main thoroughfares — close to temple gates and shrines that stand here not only for prayer but also for prestige and the seal of social trust — we see a board with a proclamation. Public notices are a sign that the city has memory and a face: decisions are not merely the whispered business of the powerful; they have a form one can read, remember, and sometimes even challenge. Centuries later, Sakai will be described as a city ruled by a merchant oligarchy: at the top stands a council composed of the richest townsmen, and administration circulates among them in the rhythm of monthly changes, as if power were a rotating obligation rather than spoils. A radical idea in the sixteenth century.

When we pass by the port, another thing reaches us: Sakai is not only “Japanese.” It is a bay of languages, accents, and customs. Merchants speak of the kingdom of Ryūkyū (which in the twentieth century we will call Okinawa) and of things arriving from the south — exotic, fragrant, sometimes unsettlingly foreign — and that Sakai knows how to draw them into its networks of exchange. In the warehouses lie goods that carry the shadow of distant seas: sulfur and copper, blades and craftsmanship, folding screens and works of art ready for shipment, even hides from the far northern Ainu; beside them, goods coming from China — ceramics, medicines, books, paintings — and fragrant incense from the south that makes even the air in a merchant’s house smell like a better tomorrow.

And then we see a workshop around which a crowd thickens. Not because a samurai duel is taking place here (those were forbidden in Sakai at the time), but because someone is creating the future. On the table lies a weapon whose shape only recently was a novelty: arquebuses, “tanegashima,” copied and improved by the hands of local craftsmen. Sakai has steel, it has knowledge, it has people who can understand a mechanism from another world; it also has merchants who do not merely sell a finished product, but organize production, combine orders, plan deliveries, build something like a manufacturing system. In times when provinces burn and other cities are regularly flooded by oceans of blood from civil war, here information about clashes and battles is simply an indication of which way the market should turn, whom to supply with what. It may seem heartless — but is it not better to work for wealth than for death?

Yet Sakai is not only a port and an armory. We see a narrow passage into a small pavilion. Someone speaks more quietly; the whisper marks a boundary: here begins the world of tea. In Sengoku, when you do not trust even (or: especially) your relatives, a small tea house becomes a kind of sanctuary of safety. Warriors set aside their weapons, remove part of their armor, squeeze through a low opening that forces the body into humility, and the host prepares tea in front of the guests — so that no one needs to suspect poison. This ritual is like a contract without a seal: amid chaos there exists a space where relationships are built by a shared vessel and a shared breath. And incidentally — there is also a luxury market where a single bowl can cost as much as the annual war budget of a minor warlord (a warlord, because not everyone is worth calling a daimyō); Sakai knows the price of beauty and can drive it up to the edge of absurdity.

As we walk on, we begin to understand what is peculiar about this place. It is a city of merchants that, in the very heart of the sword age, builds prestige on the fact that it does not need to wave one. There is money here, there is contract, there is reputation, there is a council and there are moats; and beyond them — as if in another world — Japan continues, where the names at the head of clans change faster than the weather. Sakai knows war is near, and therefore insists all the more on order. And it is precisely this tension — between a sea of blood and a city trying to be a “Venice of Asia” (as historians will sometimes later call Sakai) — that will be our key to the rest of the story.

Where did the free city of Sakai come from?

Sakai does not suddenly “spring up” out of nowhere in the fifteenth century simply because, in Sengoku, there was a need for a safe port. It has under its feet a long, heavy sediment of time — literally. The city stands on the sands of the shore of Osaka-wan Bay, and archaeology shows layers of urban remains here reaching about four meters, as if successive generations for centuries kept adding their line to the same palimpsest. Excavations in Sakai began on a larger scale in the 1970s, and one of the “hard” points of reference is a discovered burn layer connected with the cataclysm of the year 1615 — it lies roughly 1.5 meters below today’s surface.

That matters even for our story of a “free city”: in Sakai, history is not a metaphor, but the geology of streets.

But before the merchant oligarchy appeared, before trade missions and weapons workshops got underway, the area of the future Sakai was already a place “important” in a communicational and symbolic sense. In the vicinity of today’s city, traces of very early settlement were found — from prehistory through successive agricultural eras. Yet for understanding later Sakai, the key is the moment when the landscape begins to speak the language of power: the fifth century and the monumental tumuli in the Kinai region. Historians emphasize that already then, the area around Sakai served as a strategic node, and the placement of gigantic tombs in the Kawachi region (close to the sea gate to the Inland Sea of Japan) may have been deliberately chosen to “make an impression” on arrivals coming by sea routes — on the very threshold of Japan absorbing impulses from the world.

In the Middle Ages, such places — lying at the junction of land and sea — became something more than a harbor. Sakai was “by nature” a transitional place: a border and a crossroads. In fact, the very name “Sakai” is sometimes translated as “border / frontier” and linked to the fact that in the Heian period the area lay at the junction of former provinces (Settsu, Kawachi, Izumi). In practice, such an arrangement often acts like a catalyst: administrative borders hinder, but also create “fissures” — places where it is easier to trade, negotiate, move goods between jurisdictions, exploit differences in law and custom. A merchant loves borders not because they are beautiful, but because they are useful.

On top of that come the roads. Pearson describes Sakai as a point on ancient communication routes: from the coast of Osaka-wan Bay through gentle passes toward Nara (locked inland and needing a port), and also along the Wakayama coast toward the religious center of Kumano (about the old road to Kumano you can read here: Kumano Kodo: Along the Paths of Emperors, Mystics, and Bands of Rōnin on Japan’s Camino de Santiago).

This is not a sightseeing detail — it is a mechanism of growth. Pilgrimages are among the strongest engines of urbanization: they carry a stream of people, and with it money, services, lodgings, transport, food, the “small market” and the market of information. Historians call Sakai an important stop on the route to Kumano and a port for local goods and grain. If we later want to understand why, in the sixteenth century, this city could function like a self-propelling trading machine, this is its beginning: in the movement of people and goods, before great politics entered.

At the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, archaeology suggests that the surroundings of the port could still have looked modest — more like a settlement with gardens than a city. An example is a well dated to the end of the twelfth / beginning of the thirteenth century, interpreted as connected with garden economy (garden plots).

And here a rather interesting detail appears: the water the inhabitants drank came from the infrastructure of former power — from the system draining water from the great fifth-century tumuli. S. Tsuzuki in “Chusei toshi: Sakai (Sakai, medieval urban centre)” mentions the hypothesis that early farmers may have used drainage water from the surrounding tombs, and even that the moats/ditches associated with the tumuli could later have been incorporated into the city’s fortification system.

In other words: what was once a monumental demonstration of prestige becomes, over time, a utilitarian resource. In Sakai, “symbol” often passes smoothly into “function.”

At the same time — and this leads straight to later autonomy — Sakai lay on the border of shōen-type domains. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the northern part of Sakai belonged to a shōen in Settsu, and the southern part to shōen Waizumi; being on such a border, at a crossroads of old roads, gave an advantage in internal trade in Kinai and in trade “higher up” — all the way into international networks.

Such an arrangement also favors something else: the blurring of a single, hard control. If over one place “overlap” different ownership laws, privileges, temple patronage, and the interests of secular administrators, then space grows for local intermediaries. And an intermediary is precisely the embryo of the townsman-merchant: someone without a sword or a title, but with knowledge, contacts, and the ability to connect different points on the map and profit from it.

Not by accident, temples and shrines also recur in sources as real centers of influence. Powerful Shintō shrines dominated the city, situated along the main artery running parallel to the shoreline. And while discussing the thirteenth century, it is mentioned that later — in the fifteenth century — income from estates in Izumi Sakai flowed to Shōkoku-ji temple in Kyoto, and Settsu Sakai was connected with Sumiyoshi Taisha.

Seen from above, “where Sakai came from” can be told as the story of three overlapping layers. The first is the geographic layer: coast, bay, entry to the Inland Sea, proximity to Osaka and Nara, roads toward Kumano.

The second is the political-symbolic layer: the tumuli of Kinai rulers, which set this area on an axis of prestige and “first impression” for the newcomer from the sea.

The third is the institutional layer: provincial and shōen borders, temple patronage — thus a mosaic of jurisdictions that fosters the rise of people able to act between worlds.

And only on such ground, where movement is constant and control always only partial, does what in the fifteenth–sixteenth century explodes as a “free city” begin to be born: not a whim of history, but a logical consequence of conditions. Let us now see how this logic is accelerated by wars, migrations, money, and great trade networks…

Autonomy: how did the “free city” of Sakai work?

Samurai in the merchants’ pockets

Sakai’s freedom was a survival technique: the ability to organize the city so that it could be governed without a permanent samurai garrison, and at the same time — so that, if needed, it could negotiate with samurai, pay them, buy time and security. Richard J. Pearson (a Canadian archaeologist and lecturer at Vancouver Univ.) emphasizes that in the Muromachi era (when Sengoku was underway) there were ports (Sakai, Hakata) in which councils of citizens ruled and managed defense, whereas in typical “castle towns” control belonged to warriors.

At the top of Sakai society stood people whom sources like to describe as “merchant princes” — or, in Japanese realities: wealthy heads of trading houses capable of financing local lords, controlling distribution networks, and entering ventures of supraregional (even international) scale. Pearson writes plainly that these merchants financed local shugo-daimyō and estate officials (shōen) at high interest, while having a “bold, enterprising and independent mentality.”

This matters, because their legitimacy did not rest on a crest and a sword — but on capital, credit, and reputation: on the fact that they could set money in motion where a warrior had only soldiers, and a temple only authority.

There is one more, very “medieval,” feature of this legitimacy: religious-corporate. Pearson cites Morris’s view that the council of Sakai (egōshū) could have grown out of a shrine guild (shrine guild).

It sounds technical, but the consequences are deep: in late-medieval Japan, a guild under the patronage of a sacred institution is not a “trade club,” but a model of legal protection and monopoly (座, za), based on the protection of a powerful sponsor (aristocracy, temple) in exchange for services. Guilds (za) paid 座役 (za-yaku, “patronage fees”) to patrons in exchange for protection of privileges and exemptions from part of barrier or market fees.

In such an arrangement, the merchant elite is simultaneously an economic and an institutional elite: it knows the law, knows the people, has seals, has the “shield” of prestige.

The council: 36 merchants, three “on duty,” and monthly rotation

In the full bloom of the sixteenth century, Sakai had a structure that can be easily summarized: the city was governed by a council of 36 wealthy merchants, and current administration was carried out by three members, changing in a monthly rotation.

This is practically the operating manual of a free city.

Why is rotation so important? Because in Sengoku, the greatest enemy of a city need not be an “external army,” but an internal takeover: the transformation of the council into the private mafia of one family, one faction, one sponsor (above all: one clan). Rotation acts like a fuse. If executive power circulates, it is harder to tie it to one name, harder to “buy” permanently, and also harder to accuse the city that it is the personal domain of one merchant — which mattered in negotiations with warriors. It is also a way of distributing risk: administration in times of instability means responsibility for taxes, security, prices, supplies; each month on duty is a month in which one can make enemies. A rotational system makes governance a communal obligation, not a “throne.”

It sounds like a bureaucratic triviality, but in practice it means that Sakai was not free in the sense of “without levies.” It was free in the sense of: we ourselves ensure the levies are paid on time, because in return we receive a “margin of self-government.”

Taxes and discipline: freedom as “collective responsibility”

In a feudal world, the most effective form of control is not a daily patrol — but collective obligation. If the council is responsible for taxes, it must have tools to collect them: not necessarily through violence, but through communal pressure and economic sanctions. The city created conditions in which disobedience became unprofitable.

Three “springs” worked here.

The first is reputation. In a merchant city, reputation is currency (how much this mattered you can read here: A Country Without Banks – The Monetary System of the Shoguns and Credit Measured in Honor and Shame in Edo Japan.): it decides whether someone will give you credit, whether you enter a partnership, whether you get a commission, whether your goods go to good warehouses. A merchant without reputation is like a warrior without a sword — he may be standing there, but no one counts him.

The second is access to infrastructure: warehouses, the port, transport networks, information. Warehousing is key here. Control over warehouses is an important instrument of discipline.

The third is the communal fear of a “pretext.” In Sengoku, a single “unpaid duty” or one conflict was enough for a daimyō to deem it a reason to enter (he could say the city had offended his honor and it was his duty to his ancestors to level it to the ground). Therefore a city that wants autonomy is sometimes more rigorous toward its own residents than an external lord would be: because the stake is not only order, but the very existence of the model.

Security: the moat as wall, border, and tax office all in one

The most material symbol of this autonomy is the moat. The aforementioned S. Tsuzuki writes, based on archaeological research, that in 1569 — in the face of the threat of “great unrest” and takeover by Oda Nobunaga — the inhabitants began to build a moat around the “main city,” an area of about 1 × 3 km.

This was not only a military gesture. It was drawing a line: from this place onward, “Sakai order” applies.

Yet in a trading city the moat had several functions at once.

As defense — obvious: it hinders a sudden raid, slows movement, buys time to react. But in Sakai, which lives by the movement of goods, the regulatory function is just as important: the moat and gates (where they are organized) allow control over the flow of people, limit robberies, facilitate identifying outsiders. In other words: the moat is like a filter separating the chaotic world of war from the world of contract.

There is also a symbolic-legal function. In an era when boundaries of ownership and jurisdiction can be fluid, a moat creates a visible border. It tells every newcomer: “inside is a community that has its rules and can enforce them.” And finally: the moat facilitates what is key for the council — maintaining the order needed to pay taxes. If the city is to bear collective responsibility, it must have at least minimal control over who enters and leaves, where goods go, how quickly rumor spreads, how quickly panic travels.

Negotiated freedom: samurai are always nearby

And here we come to the most honest sentence about Sakai: its autonomy was real, but not absolute. The merchants of Sakai were ultimately controlled by warriors, because warriors were the only group fully able to afford the city’s luxuries and services.

In practice, this meant structural dependence: Sakai can be self-governing, but its wealth flows from the fact that someone buys weapons, pays for credit, orders prestige objects, participates in tea culture — and that someone is the world of bushi.

Nobunaga appears here not as an “evil destroyer of freedom,” but as a boundary test: can a merchant city maintain autonomy against a project of unification? Sakai capitulated to Nobunaga in 1569, but it was not harmed, because it was valuable only as long as it remained economically efficient.

And here we have another lesson: in Sengoku, violence is the basic tool, but economic pragmatism can matter more. If you want money and supplies, you do not burn the port that provides them. The people of Sakai reached an understanding with Nobunaga.

Sakai is thus a city balancing on a thin line. On the one hand it has a council, rotation, mechanisms of collective responsibility, the ability to organize defense. On the other — it lives in the shadow of those who can at any moment decide that autonomy is “too expensive.” And that is precisely why its “freedom” is so fascinating: it is not a declaration, but a daily practice, built from taxes, credit, reputation, infrastructure, and wise distrust.

An economy that feeds politics: trade, credit, warehouses, information

In Sakai, money was not an “effect” of civil war, but one of its engines. In the provinces, war was decided by units; in Sakai, it was decided by ties: ties of suppliers, obligations, contacts, and — above all — information. If we want to understand why the free city could preserve relative autonomy for decades, we must see that Sakai did not sell only goods. Sakai sold possibility: the possibility of buying rice when others no longer could; the possibility of obtaining credit when on the other side there was only plunder; the possibility of reaching people whose name opened gates in an enemy castle. It was an economy that fed politics, because Sengoku politics — brutal, unstable — constantly needed money and supplies.

Let us begin with the most down-to-earth thing: warehouses. Every port is a warehouse, but Sakai was a warehouse in an almost institutional sense. Goods did not merely pass through — they waited here until the price ripened. Rice, salt, oils, paper, textiles, metal, craft raw materials, wood, products from deep within Kinai — all of this went into depots near the waterfront, where it was weighed, repacked, secured against damp and pests, and then routed onward: to Kyoto, to Nara, to castles in various prefectures, or deeper into maritime networks. A warehouse in such a world is not a “building.” A warehouse is a lever: whoever controls the warehouse controls time — and time in Sengoku has a price.

When you control time, you naturally control credit as well. Sakai became a place where money worked not to the rhythm of the agricultural year, but to the rhythm of political opportunity. Merchants gave loans to local officials, land administrators, and warriors — often on terms that will seem ruthless to a modern reader: high interest was the price of risk, because the risk was real. A debtor could die tomorrow, his castle could be burned, his seal could lose value. Therefore credit in Sakai was not a “courteous service.” It was a civilian weapon: a mechanism that bound people with obligations, made them dependent on deadlines, turned political future into a table of receivables.

And here a detail appears that is more important than it may seem: intermediation. Sakai was a city in which many did not sell “their own,” but sold others’ — connecting producer to recipient, province to center, monastery to market, warrior to workshop. An intermediary in Sengoku Japan is someone who has access to two things at once: networks and trust. And trust was then a rare commodity, because everyone knows that in a world without stable law and stable power, honesty does not flourish. Sakai therefore created something like an “infrastructure of reputation”: merchant houses that kept their word were worth more than the contents of their warehouses.

At this point we come to the “free port” and an apparent paradox: if Sakai is sometimes described as a port that did not keep classic customs ledgers, does that not mean chaos reigned there? Quite the opposite. The absence of customs ledgers does not mean absence of control — it means a different model of control and profit. When you do not earn on formal clearance of goods through a tariff, you can earn on something more subtle: commissions and intermediation, storage, insurance of risk, credit, access to infrastructure and information. In such an arrangement, a city can attract trade with a “promise of lightness,” and at the same time manage it very firmly — not through an official with a seal, but through a community of interest in which everyone knows that disobedience threatens exclusion from the market.

And since we are speaking of information: Sakai was, in practice, a political exchange. In castle towns, information flowed downward with orders. In Sakai, information circulated like money — and was also an investment. Who controls the road to Kyoto today? Which daimyō has just lost an army? Where are warehouses burning? Which port is safe, and which has been seized? How much rice will there be this year in a given region? Such news decided prices, but also whether a ship would sail at all, whether a caravan would set out at night, or whether it was better to wait it out. In Sengoku, information could be synonymous with survival. And so a city that knew how to gather and distribute it was a city that had power — even without an army.

Sakai on the map not of Japan, but of Asia

Sakai was not large in area. Yet it was enormous in its reach. If you look at it through the eyes of a sixteenth-century merchant, you see not a “city,” but a node stretched between Japan and the rest of Asia — between Kinai and the sea, between Kyoto and the ports of the south. And the most important thing about a node is that it does not have to be the loudest. It must be indispensable.

Key here are the missions to China (the Ming dynasty). Formally, they could have a “tributary” character — that was the language of international order in that region. But in practice they were huge economic undertakings that had to be financed, serviced, and settled. Merchants from Sakai were in this world more than entrepreneurs. They were intermediaries, organizers, sometimes even “ambassadors”: people who could translate politics into logistics. Because without logistics there are not even the appearances of diplomacy.

What did contacts with China provide? Above all, prestige and goods of high unit value — the kind worth transporting and easy to convert into profit. From China came objects that in Japan functioned like a seal of cultural rank: luxury ceramics, craft products, books and texts, medicines and other medical means, paintings, sometimes elements of equipment that in elite hands became tools of symbolic domination. In the other direction Japan sent goods that mattered in regional circulation: metals, sulfur, craft products, sometimes “hard” things — the kind the economy and war needed.

Even more interesting, however, is that Sakai did not always have to sail “directly.” In East Asia there existed a brilliant intermediary corridor: Ryūkyū (today’s Okinawa and the archipelago). This channel was like a side gate to the world of the south. Through Ryūkyū, goods from Southeast Asia reached Japan more easily — fragrant, light, expensive: various aromatics and incense, exotic raw materials, sometimes products that in Japan instantly became “imagination-igniting goods.” And again: it is not only consumption. Incense and aromatics in Japan are also religion, ritual, culture — thus tools of influence. Whoever has access to such goods builds a network of dependencies: because he sells not only a thing, but the possibility of participating in the “great world.”

All of this made Sakai a port with two faces. One was hard: warehouses, rice, metal, credit, interest, deadlines. The other was soft, yet equally political: luxury, prestige, cultural goods, objects that become currency in elite conversations. And in this mixture you can see why Sakai’s economy “fed politics”: in Sengoku, politics was at once a struggle for territory and a struggle for resources, but also a struggle for legitimacy — for who looks like the victor, who has access to the center, who can distribute gifts and build alliances. Sakai supplied both iron and symbols. And a city that can sell both at once becomes dangerously influential — even if officially it rules nothing beyond its own moat.

A city of trade and craft

Sakai was a city where trade did not end at the waterfront; rather, it only began there. From the port, goods spread through the streets to workshops: narrow, smoky, loud with hammer blows, the hiss of bellows, the creak of turning tools. Excavations reveal not only foundations of houses and warehouses, but also ordinary, “almost shamelessly everyday” traces of labor: tools, production waste, spatial layouts subordinated to craft. This is important, because it allows us to see Sakai as a productive organism: a city that lives not only from intermediation, but from the ability to transform raw material into something with a higher price than the raw material itself.

The world of metal is the most obvious. Casting, ironworking, armor-making craft — all of this in Sakai created an environment where skill was capital as important as rice in a warehouse. In such cities specialization is born: some make components, others assemble, someone else only sharpens and finishes, yet someone else trades parts and manages deliveries of charcoal, wood, oils, rope. Alongside steel, other branches operated: weaving and dyeing workshops, producers of paper and everyday craft. And where there is paper and dye, there is also printing — in Sakai woodblock workshops operated that could publish Buddhist texts: a craft requiring not only a chisel, but also a distribution network, because a book is not a local product, but an export one.

In the background of all this lurks one more raw material that smells of the Sengoku era more than steel: gunpowder. For arquebuses to work, we need not only a craftsman but a supply chain — and in that chain saltpeter is key. Its import (often via southern routes, including channels leading through Ryūkyū and further toward Southeast Asia) meant that Sakai was coupled to the “distant world” not only by luxury and incense, but also by the raw material of war. In practice, this meant the city could turn geography into advantage: whoever controls access to components controls the pace of production — and pace in Sengoku could be the difference between victory and ruin.

And here we enter a paradox that makes Sakai… morally interesting. The arquebus (tanegashima) is not here merely a “weapon.” It is a commodity, a project, a service, and a promise. Sakai becomes the place where firearms enter the hands of a production system: the merchant connects workshops, organizes raw materials, sets deadlines, negotiates prices, and then speaks with a daimyō as a partner, because he sells something that can shift the balance of power. The city desires peace, because peace is stable trade, but it profits from a technology that allows war to last longer and kill more effectively. This is not cynicism of the “everyone was evil” kind. It is rather the logic of survival: in a world where samurai dictate security, a city without an army must find its equivalent of a sword — and that equivalent may be production and supplies.

Therefore Sakai’s culture has a second side: a side that looks like escape, but in fact can be a tool of politics. Chanoyu — the tea ceremony — flourishes in this era as an art of building trust in times when trust is a scarce commodity. In small pavilions, often with a low entrance forcing a bow, guests leave part of their armament; the host prepares tea in front of everyone, so no one must fear poisoning. A shared bowl acts like an agreement without a signature: a temporary suspension of suspicion. And at the same time, this world is a world of reputation and luxury: bowls, kettles, utensils, and rules of hospitality become a currency of influence. A merchant has no title, but he has a house where he can receive a man of power in such a way that the man leaves with the feeling that something exceptional has occurred. And this is the most important thing: Sakai did not only produce things. It produced situations — ones in which war fell silent for a moment, and decisions were born not on the battlefield, but over the steam rising from a bowl.

The city’s later fate

The first bell tolling for Sakai’s freedom rang not in a temple, but in the earth: when, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the city felt the pressure of Oda Nobunaga on its neck, its inhabitants deepened the moat — as if they wanted to carve into the landscape the sentence: “here the merchants’ order rules.” And yet in the Sengoku era the moat alone was not enough. Nobunaga could demand enormous “war funds” from Sakai and, step by step, draw it into the orbit of his power; it is precisely then that autonomy begins to take the form of a bargain: the city preserves life and trade, but must pay more and more, and more often explain itself for its independence.

Then comes the time of Hideyoshi — and it is he who shows where the boundary of a merchants’ republic lies when a unified state is being born. At some point he orders the moat to be filled in (symbolically: disarming the city), and administration passes ever more clearly into the hands of people acting “on behalf of” central authority. At the same time Sakai does not collapse like a cut branch: paradoxically, even under external pressure the city continues to thicken, continues to grow rich, continues to absorb goods and people — only no longer as an independent organism, but as too important a cog in the machine of unification to be allowed to operate by its own rules. In that same era, Sakai’s history intertwines with tea and politics to the point of pain: the city produced Sen no Rikyū, and its fate shows that in Sengoku even culture could be a field of pressure.

The final blow to “free Sakai” does not arrive in 1570 or 1586, but in 1615, in the shadow of the final phase of the Osaka campaigns. During the summer siege campaign, as part of actions preceding the confrontation, Sakai is set on fire — not as an accidental victim, but as an element of the game of war. The scale of the event resembles a biblical catastrophe: people speak of tens of thousands of houses consumed by flames. After that fire, the city is reorganized under new conditions, and Tokugawa power introduces direct control: Sakai is to live on, but no longer on its own terms — rather as an orderly port and economic center in a state that finally does not want to negotiate with “free cities.”

The Edo period changes Sakai as a river changes when power builds its channel. Space for political independence disappears; administrative stability and other priorities appear: instead of a risky game between daimyō, what matters are predictable supply chains and crafts that can support a family for generations. In such a Japan — more “buttoned up to the last button” — Sakai’s former power becomes harder to grasp, because it no longer shouts with moat and merchants’ council, but is dispersed in workshop labor, in warehouses, in urban memory, and in what archaeology brings out from under the asphalt: burned layers of former streets, layouts of wells, channels, houses, and depots.

And today’s Sakai is precisely like that: modern, large, embedded in the Osaka metropolitan area — and at the same time full of places of historical memory. This is where the famous Mozu kofun lie, of which the largest (Daisen kofun) belongs among the most impressive tombs in the world, and the entire complex has been inscribed on the UNESCO list. This is where the legend of craftsmanship still lives: knives and blades, incense, dye works, and also the pride of merchants — the tradition of tea and the memory of Rikyū.

And there is also modern industry, sounding like an echo of old metallurgy: for instance, the fact that Shimano’s headquarters are located precisely in Sakai. If, then, Sakai is a mirror of the Sengoku era, it is because it shows something rare: beside the sword there always existed the contract; beside plunder — logistics; and beside fear — communities that tried to invent order without an army.

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