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With over two million inhabitants, Nagoya is Japan's fourth most populated city. It is the capital of Aichi Prefecture and the principal city of the Nobi plain, one of Honshu's three large plains and industrial centers. Nagoya developed as the castle town of the Owari, one of the three branches of the ruling Tokugawa family during the Edo Period. Much of the city, including most of its historic buildings, were destroyed in the air raids of 1945. Nagoya's main industry is the automotive business, as many Japanese automotive companies are based out of Nagoya (akin to U.S. automakers being based out of Detroit). Toyota is headquartered in the nearby city of Toyota. Major automotive suppliers such as PPG also have a presence in Nagoya. The Japanese confectionery company Marukawa is headquartered in Nagoya, as is the fine ceramics company Noritake.

Located on the Pacific coast in the Chubu region on central Honshu, it is the capital of Aichi Prefecture and is one of Japan's major ports along with those of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Chiba, and Hakata. It is also the center of Japan's third largest metropolitan region, known as the Chukyo Metropolitan Area. As of 2000, Chukyo Metropolitan Area has 8.74 million people, of which 2.17 million live in the city of Nagoya.

In 1610, Tokugawa Ieyasu moved the capital of Owari province from Kiyosu around seven kilometers to a more strategic location in present-day Nagoya. A new large castle, Nagoya Castle, was constructed partly from materials sourced from Kiyosu Castle. Along with the construction, the entire town of around 60,000 people, including the temples and shrines, moved from Kiyosu to the new planned town around Nagoya Castle. Around the same time not far away, the ancient Atsuta Shrine was designated as a way station called Miya (the Shrine) on the important Tokaido that linked the two capitals of Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). The town thus developed around the temple to support travelers. The combination of these two castle and shrine towns forms what we now call Nagoya. Through the following years Nagoya became an industrial hub for the surrounding region. Its economic sphere included the famous pottery towns Tokoname, Tajimi and Seto, as well as Okazaki, one of the only places where gunpowder was produced under the shogunate. Other industries in the area included cotton and complex mechanical dolls called karakuri ningyo. Part of the modernization efforts of the Meiji Restoration saw a restructuring of Japan's provinces into prefectures and the government changed from family rule to that by government officials. Nagoya was proclaimed a city on October 1, 1889, and designated a city on September 1, 1956 by government ordinance. The city's name was historically written as the older Emperor of that time (also read as Nagoya), and as the city is located between Kyoto, Shikoku and Tokyo, it was also historically known as "central capital"

One of the earliest censuses, carried out in 1889, gave Nagoya's population as 157,496. It reached the 1 million mark in 1934 and, as of 2004, the city had an estimated population of 2,202,111 with a density of 6,745 persons per km². There are estimated to be 945,328 households in the city — a significant increase from 153,370 at the end of World War II, in 1945.