 With a population around 1.5 million, the city is part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kyoto.The earliest written records regarding the region come from the "Nihon Shoki", which describes the founding of the Ikuta Shrine by Empress Jingū in AD 201.For most of its history, the area was never a single political entity, even during the Tokugawa period, when the port was controlled directly by the Tokugawa shogunate.