History
The area that makes up Gifu Park has a long and important role in the history of Gifu City. Though Mount Kinka was strategically important for military purposes, living in the castle atop the mountain would have made daily life very difficult. As such, many important rulers built their main residences at the base of the mountain in modern day Gifu Park.
One of those residences used to belong to Oda Nobunaga. It was called Senjō-jiki (千畳敷), which literally means "one-thousand tatami mats." The residence was so large that it covered approximately two-thirds of the present day park. Much was known about the residence because the Portuguese Jesuit Missionary Luis Frois wrote about it extensively in his journals during his time visiting with Nobunaga, even going so far as to say that Gifu was "as bustling as Babylon." However, until excavation began in 1984, it was unknown whether or not this was actually Nobunaga's Senjō-jiki.
Additionally, the park has also been home to a zoo, an aquarium, the Gifu Prefectural Library, and the Gifu City Science Museum. However, all those facilities have been closed or moved.
Read more about this topic: Gifu Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)