Besides these two distinct cultural circles, there arose a third group of people, who entered the cultured arena in the latter half of the seventeenth century. I mean the bourgeois class in several large cities. After the decline of the trade of the historic city of Sakai, brought about by the hard blow struck at the root of the political power of her haughty merchants by Nobunaga, and caused also by the growth of a rival in the great commercial city of Osaka founded by Hideyoshi quite near it, the refined humanistic culture cherished by the citizens of Sakai vanished with its prosperity. After that, it took a considerable while to witness the revival of the cultural influence of the bourgeois class in Japan. The tranquillity, however, which the Tokugawa Shogunate had brought on our country, did not fail to cause such a revival, though not again in Sakai, yet at least in the two greatest commercial centres of the empire. The one was Yedo on the east, and the other Osaka on the west. Of these two cities, in affluence Osaka, on account of its geographical advantages, was several steps ahead of Yedo. Not only was it near Kyoto, the centre of the humanistic culture as ever, but its remoteness from Yedo had induced its merchants to become more independent than those in the Shogun's own city of the influence of the strong military regime. The culture fostered in the city, therefore, was nearer to that of the non-military circles than that of Yedo. Nay, Osaka went still further, even by a great many steps, than Yedo. It was here that Monzayemon Chikamatsu, the first and the greatest dramatist Japan has ever produced, demonstrated his peerless talent at the end of the seventeenth century, and here was also one of the cradles of the modern Japanese theatre. Yedo, however, could not remain long alien to this fresh cultural current initiated in Kyoto and Osaka. On account of its growing prosperity brought on by the constant comings in and out of hundreds of _daimyo_ and their numerous retinues, the newly started political capital was soon enabled to rival the senior city of Osaka in the liveliness of its urban social life, and in some respects surpassed that of Kyoto. The plutocrats of Osaka had also a very close relation with the military regime. This relation, however, consisted in lending large sums of money to various _daimyo_, many of whom had their warehouses there to deposit therein the produce of their territory, used as pledges for getting advances of money from those merchants, and on that account their pay-masters with their staffs were stationed there to enable them to transact the customary financial business. On the other hand, the merchants of Yedo generally profited by providing, as purveyors and contractors, necessary commodities to the Shogunate and to the _daimyo_, and therefore depended more closely on the military regime, though some of them also advanced money as did the merchants of Osaka.