Tokyo-Yokohama Metropolitan Area

▪ Japan

Introduction

Tokyo formerly (until 1868)  Edo 

 metropolitan complex—commonly called Greater Tokyo—along the northern and western shores of Tokyo Bay, on the Pacific coast of the island of Honshu, central Japan. At its centre is the metropolitan prefecture, or metropolis (to), of Tokyo, Japan's capital and largest city. Three prefectures (ken) bordering it— Saitama on the north, Chiba on the east, and Kanagawa on the south—may be said to make up the remainder of the complex, but there is more than one definition of Greater Tokyo, and large numbers of people live beyond the four prefectures and commute to work in the region.

      The expression “city of Tokyo” usually refers to the 23 wards (ku) that constitute the city proper. In 1943, however, this city ceased to exist as an administrative unit and was subsumed within the larger Tokyo metropolis, which includes rural and mountainous regions west of the city and the Izu Islands, stretching southward from the mouth of Tokyo Bay, and the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, some 500 miles (800 kilometres) to the southeast in the Pacific Ocean.

 There are three other major cities within the metropolitan area. Yokohama, about 20 miles southwest of Tokyo, is the second largest city in Japan. The industrial city of Kawasaki lies between Tokyo and Yokohama. Both Yokohama and Kawasaki are in Kanagawa prefecture. Chiba, in Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo on the northeast coast of the bay, is also heavily industrialized.

      Tokyo (Japanese: Tōkyō), meaning “Eastern Capital,” was the name given to the city of Edo when the seat of the imperial family was moved there from Kyōto (“Capital City”) in 1868. Pop. (2005 est.) 35,197,000.

Physical and human geography

The landscape

Site

 The old city of Edo occupied alluvial and reclaimed lands along and to the east of the Sumida River (which flows just east of central Tokyo) and hills to the west of the river. The site was chosen for strategic reasons. It commands the southern approaches to the Kantō Plain, the largest in Japan. Saitama is mostly flat, and in Kanagawa hills prevail, though both prefectures give way to mountains along their inland extremities, as also does Tokyo. Much of the mercantile centre of Edo was reclaimed from the Sumida estuary, which reached to the grounds of the premodern castle (now the imperial palace).

      Two other rivers of note in the region are the Tama, the lower reaches of which form the eastern boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures; and the Tone (Tone River), the main course of which lies some distance north of Tokyo. The Tone is the second longest river in Japan, and its drainage basin is the largest. Before the 17th century it flowed through what is now Tokyo and into the bay, but for flood control the Tokugawa shogunate diverted it. The main mouth of the Tone is now at the northeastern corner of Chiba prefecture, although a minor branch, the Edo River, continues to flow into the bay and forms the boundary between Tokyo and Chiba prefectures. The Sumida, of different origins, continued to flood the city until the Arakawa Drainage Channel, roughly parallel to the Sumida and a short distance to the east of it, was put through in the years before the 1923 earthquake.

      The eastern districts, because they lie on unconsolidated, geologically unstable land and because they have been the more crowded and less affluent parts of the city, have been prone to disaster. They were almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and the aerial bombings of 1945. The palace lies at the boundary between the flatlands and the more prosperous and geologically stable hilly regions. The flatlands—the Downtown, or Low City—dominated the mercantile culture of Edo. The hilly Uptown, or High City, has been increasingly dominant in the 20th century. The shift may be taken as a concise summary of what has transpired since Edo became Tokyo.

      From its origins along the Sumida estuary, the city has spread in all directions, even into the bay. Reclamation has been continuous and since 1950 has been so extensive that the reclaimed lands are the centre of highly imaginative, perhaps somewhat dreamy, schemes for the future. This is inevitable, since most of the rest of Tokyo metropolitan prefecture is now full of people and since vast tracts of suburbia lie beyond the authority of the prefectural government. The general direction of movement for this constantly moving city has been westward. Until 1991 City Hall, which might more properly be called the Prefectural Office, was near the old centre of the city, just east of the palace and within the outer moat of Edo Castle. In 1991 it moved to a part of Shinjuku, a western “satellite centre” that was not fully within the city limits until 1932. The new site is nearer the population centre of the prefecture than the old.

      By 1932 the city limits were no longer realistic. Twenty new wards were added around the old 15, and Tokyo suddenly became the second (or perhaps third) largest city in the world. It does not matter so much now that the 23 wards, to which the 35 were reduced in 1947, no longer contain the city, because the “ward part” has no administrative significance. A popular saying had it that Edo ended at what is now the campus of the University of Tokyo, to the north of the palace. It would not take an hour for a good walker to go the distance from the old mercantile centre, east of the palace and castle, to the university. A walk today to the farthest northern suburbs would take the best of walkers many hours.

Climate

      Although Tokyo lies somewhat farther south than Washington, D.C., the two cities have similar climates. In both the one really uncomfortable season is the summer, when humidity is extreme, and the temperature may rise to above 100° F (38° C). On most August days in Tokyo it rises to near 90° F (32° C), and it is not the heat but the humidity, near saturation, that matters. The winters are brisk but not savagely cold. Heavy snowstorms usually come in early spring and quickly melt away. The temperature sometimes drops below freezing but only slightly. Winter is the sunniest season of the year and has the cleanest air. It is the only season when one would not be startled to see Mount Fuji from a high building near the centre of the city.

      Spring and autumn are delightful, though the weather tends to be more turbulent than in Washington. There are rainy periods in early summer and early autumn. The latter is associated with typhoons, the Pacific equivalent of the hurricane. It is a rare year in which one or more does not strike the region. The flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn have been endlessly and justly celebrated in Japanese poetry. May, with its peonies, azaleas, wisteria, and dogwood, is the most flowery month, although the more famous cherry blossoms come early in April. Plums, camellias, and witch hazel bloom yet earlier. At no time of the year, even the “dead” of winter, is the city without outdoor blossoms.

Layout

Centre and satellites

  Western visitors of the 19th century described Edo and Tokyo as not so much a city as a collection of villages. This characterization is found, for instance, in one of the most detailed of these early accounts, by an American who accompanied Ulysses S. Grant on his visit to the city in 1879. Doubtless it was accurate a century and some decades ago, and it still obtains today, though “cities” might now be a more appropriate word than “villages.”

      Most people would probably still put the centre of Tokyo much where the centre of Edo was, immediately to the east of the palace. Marunouchi, inside the outer castle moat (now filled in), is the entrepreneurial hub of the city and of Japan; it is where the prefectural offices were until 1991. Farther east, immediately beyond the avenue built on the filled-in moat, there has been a shift. Nihombashi, the “Japan Bridge” that was (and still is) considered the starting point for roads to the provinces, was the unchallenged mercantile centre of Edo. Today Ginza, farther south, is more important, even though it is not the largest retail district in the city. Kasumigaseki, immediately to the south of the palace, has been the bureaucratic centre of the city since shortly after it became the imperial capital. Located there and in neighbouring districts to the west are the main offices of the national government, including the National Diet Building and the prime minister's residence.

      For the rest of Tokyo, there has been a huge proliferation of what are called “satellite centres,” the largest of them every bit as deserving of the name city as are Kawasaki and Chiba. Shinjuku is the largest and is the main retail and entertainment district in the city and in the land. More people pass through Shinjuku railway station, on their way from and to home in the sprawling western suburbs, than through any other station in Japan and, quite possibly, in the world. Second—and perhaps catching up because of its popularity among teenagers—is Shibuya, to the south; and third is Ikebukuro, to the north. All three lie along the western arc of the Yamanote Line, the railway that circles much of the main part of the city. They bespeak the general tendency of the city to move westward.

      There are others, such as Ueno, a short distance west of the Sumida, and Nakano, west of Shinjuku; and to the number might be added central Yokohama, even though Yokohama is a separate city and not a satellite centre. Its traditional role as the port for greater Tokyo having declined, it is asserting its independence as a hub for shopping, conventions, and the like. The beautification of the nondescript waterfront has been a conspicuous success. Though Chinese are numerous in such Tokyo centres as Shinjuku, Yokohama is alone among them in having a genuine and vibrant Chinatown.

Street patterns

      Despite disasters and modernization, the street pattern of central Tokyo resembles that of Edo. Old streets have been widened and new streets cut through, but after both of its great modern disasters, in 1923 and 1945, the city pulled itself together in much the same shape that it had had before. The old centre of the city is essentially a cobweb, with the palace grounds at its centre, reflecting the defensive arrangement of the castle town. The old flatlands to the east are in a grid pattern, with the grids not ideally joining one another.

      One might expect the plan of a city to become more rational as it expands and planners start exerting themselves. This has not been true of Tokyo, and still less is it true of the suburbs that lie beyond the prefectural boundaries. There really is no plan and no pattern, except, in a rudimentary sense, the old cobweb. Streets wander along valleys and ridges, and one can often sense in them what the disorder of the old paddy fields must have been.

      The cobweb survives in main arteries that radiate out from the centre, leaving the old city through post stations called the Five Mouths. The most important of these was Shinagawa, to the south, first of the 53 stages on the Tōkaidō (the main coastal road to Kyōto) celebrated in the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and others. It is still situated on the oldest and most important highway to Yokohama and beyond. The old highway to the mountainous province of Kai (modern Yamanashi prefecture) passes through Shinjuku, directly west of the palace. To the northwest, not as important as it once was, is Itabashi, through which passes the old inland road to Kyōto. More than one highway departed for the north through Senjū, which had two of the Five Mouths.

      Most of Yokohama is like the western part of Tokyo, which is to say, confusing—more consistently confusing, even, than Tokyo. Motorists, defeated by its random streets, have been known to descend from their automobiles and look for the North Star, though the air is seldom clear enough to reveal it. The city is for the most part hilly, and, confronted with a hill, a Japanese road or street tends to wander off in search of a detour. Only a limited band to the south and west of the original Yokohama railway terminus (now Sakuragi-chō station) and the harbour area are in something like a grid pattern.

      One looks in vain for traces of the old Kanagawa post station in Yokohama and is similarly frustrated with regard to the one that was in Kawasaki, farther north toward Tokyo. Probably because it lost its castle some centuries ago, Chiba wears the aspect of a medieval castle town less than does Tokyo: a visitor to the city has to be told where the castle was.

Green space

      Mists, natural and man-made, so pile upon one another in the Tokyo skies that the view from one of the Shinjuku skyscrapers is not likely, on an average day, to go very far. When it does, one may be surprised at the amount of greenery. Ōsaka is an ashen city by comparison, and even Kyōto, the ancient capital, is wanting in the wide and beautiful parks that are scattered throughout Tokyo. The cemeteries are also wide, verdant, and beautiful. Grave viewing can be a satisfying pastime.

      The traditional pattern for viewing the flowers and grasses of the seasons has shown remarkable powers of survival. The famous places of Edo were mostly in the northern and eastern districts, and they are so situated in Tokyo as well. In spite of disasters and crowding, the flatlands and the hills along their immediate fringes are still where the blossom-viewing crowds gather. In this phenomenon may be found, indeed, the only regard in which the old Low City has held its own against the growing cultural hegemony of the High City.

      There are famous new places, to be sure, such as the iris gardens of the Meiji Shrine, said to have been designed by the Meiji emperor himself; and such blossoms as the camellia and the chrysanthemum are to be seen everywhere. For the first in the annual procession of important blossoms, the plum, most people go to the Yushima Shrine, near Ueno Park (Ueno Zoological Gardens). Ueno Park itself, along with the Sumida embankment, was the most famous place in Edo for cherry blossoms. It remains the most famous of Tokyo as well. Ueno also contains a renowned peony garden. Probably the most famous of peony gardens is at Nishiarai Daishi temple, north of the Ara River. The best-known azalea garden is at the Nezu Shrine, just north of the University of Tokyo. For wisteria one can do no better than the Kameido shrine, in the eastern suburbs until 1932. As beautiful as the iris garden at the Meiji Shrine are those at Horikiri and Mizumoto, in the eastern part of the city. For the lotuses of full summer it is Ueno again. Then come chrysanthemums and autumn foliage, the latter best viewed in the mountains.

      The parks of Yokohama are newer than those of Tokyo, but there are fine ones. The most popular, Yamashita, is on land reclaimed from the bay with debris from the 1923 earthquake. The Sankei Garden, some distance south of the city centre, was built and presented to the city by a 19th-century silk merchant. The park once reposed by the bay, but reclamation has put it inland some distance and in some measure lessened its beauty. It contains a collection of fine old buildings moved from elsewhere. The lands between Sakuragi-chō and the harbour were once grim docks and warehouses. Now they are like a field of densely blooming wildflowers, the impression of wildness being carefully cultivated.

Building styles

      Tamed nature in parks, gardens, temples, and cemeteries aside, it cannot be said that Tokyo is a beautiful city. Physically, it is among the newest cities in the world: almost nothing is as much as a century old. Disaster helps explain this fact, but it is not the only reason. Traditionally, the Japanese have not built for durability. Buildings are torn down at a rate that would be remarkable in most places and is next to unbelievable in a country that thinks itself strapped for resources. So almost everything is new, and rebuilding seems to result inevitably in something less distinguished than what was replaced. The view from a moderately high window will most commonly look out on several dozens of buildings, all of which are in unimaginative modern styles.

      Skyscrapers (skyscraper) are a relatively recent phenomenon, dating only from the completion (1968) of the 36-story Kasumigaseki Building just south of the government ministries. Until then, aesthetic and engineering considerations had kept buildings to a maximum of about 10 stories, but there soon blossomed a number of high-rise structures, all purported by their builders to be earthquake-resistant. The largest cluster of skyscrapers rises to the west of Shinjuku station, although Yokohama boasts the tallest building in Japan: the 70-story Landmark Tower, completed in 1993.

      Surviving pockets of wooden structures from perhaps the turn of the 20th century, as well as the xylographic art of Edo, tell us that Tokyo must once have been a very pleasing city—in the severe, monochrome manner held by many to be peculiarly Japanese. The pockets will soon go, to be replaced by cheaper, perhaps more comfortable, certainly uglier modern things. The city still contains a scattering of buildings in premodern European styles, including a rather fine Queen Anne building in the Kasumigaseki bureaucratic quarter; but cracker-box modern has been overwhelmingly favoured since World War II. To let these facts prey on one's mind is to overlook a very important point: that an ugly face can also be a very animated and endearing face.

The people

      The most striking fact about the population of Greater Tokyo is that it is so large. The four prefectures of the metropolitan area contain one-fourth of all the people in Japan. The population of the 23 wards of Tokyo is stabilized at roughly eight million, while that of outlying regions continues to grow rapidly. Two other cities within the complex, Yokohama and Kawasaki, have populations of more than a million.

      The average age for Tokyoites is well under that for the rest of the nation. It is a city of young people, and they flood the streets. Though the very young are a little afraid of Shinjuku and its gangs, the streets on the whole are safe. So, Tokyo is filled with young people nudging past one another not in automobiles but on sidewalks; in this regard, not many cities can be its equal. It conveys a sense of irresistible vitality. It may be quiet and unpeopled in the hours before and after dawn, but at other hours none of the bustling centres is without its crowds. Ordinary neighbourhoods are quieter than they once were, because more people are indoors watching television—notably baseball (the national sport) during the season. Nonetheless, the pedestrian crowds continue to be far more widely diffused than in any American city.

      The origins of the Tokyo populace are mostly in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Japan's other great megalopolis, centred upon Ōsaka, draws from the south and west. It is reasonable to ask why masses of people continue to pour in who know full well how crowded it already is and how trying it can be, especially for the newcomer. It is dangerous to generalize about national traits, but one may hazard a simple answer: the Japanese love to be where everyone is, and there are nearly as many people in one conurbation or the other as everywhere else in Japan put together.

      Although Yokohama has passed Ōsaka in population, the latter is still considered Japan's “second” city. Ōsaka is the focal point of its conurbation, while Yokohama is largely a bedroom town for Tokyo. Yokohama retains its international flavour from the days when it was Japan's chief entrepôt with the West, even though its foreign community is much smaller than it once was. Tokyo, in spite of a substantial foreign population and its world-class status, has considerably less of a cosmopolitan feel than a city such as New York.

The economy

Industry

      Since the war Tokyo has taken over from Ōsaka the role of leading industrial centre in the country. The region has a highly diversified manufacturing base. Heavy industries—such as metals, chemicals, machinery, transportation equipment, and oil refining—are concentrated in Chiba, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. Tokyo proper is strongly inclined toward light industry. Most of Japan's books and much of its electronic equipment, for instance, are produced there.

Commerce and finance

      More noteworthy than the concentration of industry is the concentration of management and finance in and near Tokyo. Even companies with factories elsewhere maintain large offices in Tokyo, and the proper corporate location is Marunouchi. There is a good reason for keeping a Tokyo office—proximity to government offices—although a chumminess between managers and bureaucrats is thought by many to be not entirely healthy.

      Finance has been more conservative geographically than has management, with Nihombashi, the commercial and financial centre of Edo, as its main seat. Located there are the Bank of Japan and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Japan's two most important financial institutions. The latter is much busier than the Ōsaka Stock Exchange, but this may be somewhat misleading: a very large proportion of stocks are in intercompany holdings that do not go on the market. This arrangement is a defense against hostile takeovers and also a continuing assurance of cooperation among the members of the giant conglomerates; but it makes the stock market easily manipulatable and less than ideally subject to market forces.

      During the 1980s, as Japan was emerging as an economic superpower, Tokyo suddenly found itself a global financial centre. This remarkable growth rate came to be called the “bubble economy.” The expression refers to speculation in general, but most particularly to land speculation and to Tokyo, where land prices have been the most outrageously exorbitant in the country. By the early 1990s, however, overinflated stock and land prices led to a “bursting” of the bubble, so curious a phenomenon that the Japanese grasp of the word “bubble” seems in doubt. The English word is most commonly used, and when it is put into Japanese (awa) the rendition is “foam” rather than “bubble.” What has happened does seem more like a subsidence of foam than a thorough burst of a bubble.

Transportation

      The emergence of modern Tokyo came at the beginning of the transportation revolution of the late 19th century. The first railroad in Japan was put through from Tokyo to Yokohama in 1872. The city continues to be the most important transportation centre in the country. The busiest rail stations are those accommodating commuters to the western suburbs, but the traveler who wishes to go considerable distances by rail usually leaves from Tokyo station, in Marunouchi, or Ueno station, a couple of miles to the north. Only since 1991 has it been possible to take a Shinkansen express train to northern Japan from Tokyo station, as Ueno was the traditional terminus for northbound travel.

      Most international travel is through the highly inconvenient airport at Narita, in Chiba prefecture, at least an hour by rail from central Tokyo. Opened in 1978, the facility has been at the centre of controversy since its inception, mainly because of opposition by landowners to the appropriation of their property. The older, smaller, and rather more convenient airport at Haneda, near the Tama River, accommodates domestic travel and a few international flights. Yokohama still is the most important port in the region, the other major ports being Chiba, Kawasaki, and Tokyo.

      Tokyo's streets are flooded not only with people but also with vehicles, and traffic can become almost gridlocked at busy times and in busy places. There is a good system of roads and express highways in the city and region, but it is woefully inadequate for the crush of traffic. A splendid network of subways and commuter rail lines provides an alternative to the automobile.

Administration and social conditions

Government

      The two most populous prefectures of Japan, Tokyo and Ōsaka, are the two smallest in area. Though somewhat larger than Ōsaka, Tokyo occupies roughly a third of the premodern province of Musashi, the remainder of which is in Saitama prefecture. Tokyo and Ōsaka were two of the three urban prefectures (fu) established in 1872, the third being Kyōto. The thinking seems to have been that the two should be just that, metropolitan complexes—each essentially a city and its suburbs—and the smaller they were, the more easily they could be controlled. Kyōto, which was not expected to grow like the other two and did not, was not so treated.

      The expansion of the city in 1932 made the city limits coincide with the prefectural boundaries in all directions but the west, where lay the “county part” of the prefecture, as distinguished from the “ward part.” The amalgamation of city and prefecture and establishment of the metropolitan prefecture in 1943 made the largest municipality in the land the only one without a mayor. The county part now consists largely of incorporated cities, all of which have mayors.

      Legislative authority in the metropolis rests with the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, consisting of 127 members elected to 4-year terms. The principal elected official is the prefectural governor, who has authority over a number of administrative commissions and commissioners, including the fire department and those for public works. Each of the 23 wards has a popularly elected council and ward head, with limited authority over local matters.

Services

      Edo had a sophisticated, though inadequate, system of aqueducts. Three principal ones brought water from the highlands to the west of the city. Many houses and clusters of houses had wells, which could turn brackish, especially in the low flatlands. (Some districts east of the Sumida lay below sea level. Subsidence, from drawing underground water, made them sink yet lower.) Thus, the purveying of fresh water was a thriving business.

      Most of the water for the city now comes from the Tama and, increasingly, the Tone rivers (Tone River). Tokyo would like to go yet farther afield, bringing water that now flows into the Sea of Japan across the mountains by tunnel to the Tone. It cannot do this by itself, and there is opposition in the rural prefecture chiefly affected. Yokohama and Kawasaki draw their water from the Sagami River, which rises near the base of Mount Fuji and empties into the ocean a short distance southwest of Yokohama.

      Sewers did not exist in Edo. The common means of waste disposal was the sewage (sewage system) cart, sometimes called the “honey-bucket” wagon. A seller's market, with the carter paying for sewage, gradually became a buyer's market as the city grew and the fields to which the carts traveled got farther away. During the years after World War I, Shinjuku was known as the “anus of Tokyo.” The principal route to the fields ran through it, and every afternoon and evening carts would be backed up along the main street. Even in the years after World War II, Tokyo was a most malodorous city. The goal of sewers accommodating all the built-up regions is in sight. They probably will never get to remote mountain and island regions.

      Tens of thousands of tons of garbage must be disposed of each day. The mass grows more rapidly than the population, for affluence brings less careful and efficient habits of consumption than in the past. In the years after the Olympic Games of 1964, the city was on the verge of civil war over the problem of what to do about the huge accumulation. The poorer eastern wards were called upon to dispose of it, and the affluent western wards produced most of it. The prefectural government agreed that disposal arrangements were unfair. Today there are garbage plants throughout the city that incinerate what they can. The remainder goes into fills in the bay that are at the heart of the grandest development schemes of the city. Though pretty parks are situated on them, for the most part they remain eyesores. From one of these fills, named with great though probably unintended irony “Dream Island” (Yume no shima), originated in 1965 a huge plague of flies that spread over the eastern part of the city. The site has been under better control since but continues to be a not very dreamlike place.

      Electricity and gas are provided by private companies. The electric company has plants, including nuclear ones, as far afield as the coast of the Sea of Japan. Most of the gas is produced at a plant along the bay in Yokohama that is widely held to be a marvel of advanced technology.

Housing

      Inflated land prices have been among the most serious and intractable problems facing Tokyo. Almost no one who does not inherit land can hope to own it in the old city, and estate taxes can take away even family land. Those who can afford to live closer in typically inhabit relatively small condominium apartments in buildings with the Japanese-English name manshon (“mansions”); those of lesser means may be fortunate enough to rent a cramped apartment in the rather dreary public-housing structures called danchi. The typical office worker, however, must commute cruel distances, for as many as four and five hours a day round-trip. Land prices have fallen since the early 1990s, but not enough to make land near the several centres affordable to the middle class.

Cultural life

      Tokyo dominates Japanese culture as no American city dominates American culture. Perhaps France and its Paris are a similar instance, but there cannot be many such in the world. Greater Tokyo contains a third of the universities in the country. In addition, the majority of important learned societies, research institutes, and libraries and most of the publishing houses are found there. Most writers, journalists, and “opinion makers” live in Greater Tokyo. Museums may not be as grand as those of New York City, but they are far grander than those of any other Japanese city. So, too, are the theatres and concert halls. The most important cultural institutions (e.g., the Tokyo National Museum, National Diet Library, National Theatre, and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) are found near national government offices or in Ueno.

      It is arguable that Tokyo is culturally the most varied city in the world. Certainly it is a city in which one has little excuse for being bored. One with time to kill has a choice of doing it in several cities, each different from the others, and a choice between the present and the past and between East and West as well. It may be that at any one time Tokyo has a more limited choice in the Western arts than a great American or European city, but everything comes if one but waits, and no Occidental city is a competitor in offering the arts of the Orient, modern or traditional.

History

The premodern period

      Tokyo celebrated its 500th anniversary in 1957. The calculation was from the most likely date for the initial fortification of Edo. The structure cannot have been elaborate, probably little more than a house upon a low eminence with log ramparts. There must have been a village on the site from much earlier. The ancient Sensō Temple (popularly called the Asakusa Kannon), east of Ueno station and near the Sumida, dates from perhaps the late 7th century (although nearly all its structures are postwar). The name Edo means something like “estuary” or “inlet.” The clan in possession of the area bore the name Edo, taken from the name of the village.

      Edo did not amount to much until the 17th century. The first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu (Tokugawa Ieyasu), took possession of Edo in 1590 and in 1603 made it the seat of his government, which effectively controlled the country and left only ceremonial functions with the imperial court and Kyōto. The marshy estuary was largely filled in during the course of the century, and Nihombashi became the heart of the mercantile city. The military aristocracy did not disdain the flatlands, but they quite dominated the hilly regions to the west. The court aristocracy remained in Kyōto.

      Growth was rapid through the 17th and 18th centuries. Early in the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) Kyōto maintained its old cultural preeminence. Cultural hegemony then moved to Ōsaka, Japan's other great mercantile city. By the end of the 18th century it had moved to Edo, where it reposed in 1868, when the emperor moved from Kyōto and the name was changed to Tokyo. The Edo century, as it may be called, was not among Japan's finer periods for the graphic and literary arts, but it was very good for the theatre. The kabuki, the great love of the Edo townspeople, reached remarkable heights of subtlety and sophistication.

      Edo may well have become the largest city in the world in the 18th century. It passed a million people before London and Paris did and probably was larger than the capitals of the Ottoman and Chinese empires. At the end of the Tokugawa period the regions east of the castle were much more important than those to the west, where only a thin residential band lay. The districts immediately east of the castle and on beyond the Sumida River had become the most important cultural centre in the land. This changed utterly during the 20th century. Today the east has scarcely anything to offer in cultural terms, while the west has everything.

      Throughout its history the city has been prone to disaster. There were severe earthquakes between the arrival of the first shogun and the end of the Tokugawa regime, but the commonest disaster was fire, known as “the flower of Edo.” Though there were fires of great magnitude in 1923 and 1945, the flower gradually has been extirpated. The most considerable Edo fire occurred in 1657, which happened to be the city's bicentennial (though no one seems to have noticed). About two-thirds of the city was destroyed, including much of the castle, and upwards of 100,000 people died.

      Kawasaki was, during the Tokugawa centuries, the second stage from Nihombashi on the Tōkaidō, the main coastal road to Kyōto. Yokohama was an isolated fishing village that did not really emerge into history until after the visit of Commodore Matthew Perry and his “black ships” in 1853. Though it is not known exactly what stood on the Sumida estuary before 1457, Chiba may be called an older city than Edo-Tokyo: it had a castle from the 12th century.

The Meiji (Meiji Restoration) period (1868–19l2)

      The population of the city plummeted during the disturbances that made it the capital. By the middle of the Meiji period it had returned to the highest Edo figure, and by the end of the reign it had passed two million. The city limits reached to the Shinagawa post stage on the south but fell short of Shinjuku on the west. On the north they passed a short distance beyond Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), and on the east they stretched a short distance beyond the Sumida. At no point did they reach as far as the boundaries of the urban prefecture.

       Ginza, which had not amounted to much during the Tokugawa centuries, was thrust to the fore of “civilization and enlightenment”—by which was meant, essentially, Westernization—by an accident: the great fire of 1872. The rebuilding was in brick, a material not before used by the Japanese. Sometime later the Mitsubishi (Mitsubishi Group) enterprises set about turning their “meadow,” vacant land within the outer castle moat, into a business centre. This became the Marunouchi district, also largely built of brick. Only fragments of the Ginza “bricktown” and of what came to be called the Mitsubishi “Londontown” survive. Monumental architecture in those years tended toward decorated European styles, though sometimes, as in the Bank of Japan building, Grecian austerity prevailed. Most of the city continued to be wooden, low, and of small units. No specimens of an earlier hybrid style, Western in many of its details but Japanese in its general aspect, survive in the city, but examples may still be found in the provinces.

      These were the years of the great national effort—presided over, of course, from Tokyo—to catch up with the world. It was a huge success. By the end of the Meiji period, Japan was an ally of England and had won wars with China and Russia.

      The history of Yokohama begins just before Meiji. The Harris Treaty of 1858 provided that Kanagawa was to be among the ports opened to foreign trade. The Japanese quickly began having second thoughts. Kanagawa was a well-trodden place, the third stage from Nihombashi on the Tōkaidō. This seemed to invite trouble, the situation being one in which Japanese and foreigners could not easily be kept in their places. So Yokohama, a more isolated and easily policed spot, was opened instead. A fishing village, it lay some distance from the Tōkaidō road, beyond the inlet that was to become Yokohama Harbour. By the end of the Meiji it was numbered, along with Tokyo, Ōsaka, Kōbe, Nagoya, and Kyōto, among the large cities of the nation. Japanese demography in those days was somewhat peculiar. There were the six cities just mentioned, no mid-size cities, and a multitude of small cities.

      Kawasaki was by the end of the Meiji period already a growing industrial centre. Chiba remained a sleepy country town. Kanagawa is now a part of Yokohama, near the central railway station.

The region since 1912

      Neither the earthquake of Sept. 1, 1923, nor the firebombing of March 9–10, 1945, much the most damaging, destroyed as large a part of the city or killed as many people as the fire of 1657. Both were huge disasters all the same, and in both cases the worst damage was in the crowded, flimsily built eastern flatlands. In 1930 a festival was held celebrating complete recovery from the earthquake. It was in a way prophetic, for the dark years of military adventuring lay ahead, and further development of the capital was not a matter of central concern. There was no similar festival after 1945, nor has rebuilding and new building ever come to a halt. The metropolitan region has relentlessly grown and developed.

      The Olympic Games of 1964 have been given exaggerated importance as one of the great events in the history of the city and as the equivalent of the 1930 festival. In fact, profits from the Korean War (1950–53) had been put to good use in rebuilding city and country, and, as with the earthquake, recovery from the disaster of 1945 might be put at about a decade after its occurrence. Yet the Olympics without doubt did great things for the morale of city and country. They were the first Asian Olympics, and they marked the return of Japan to international respectability. If much has been built since the war, much has also been destroyed. The last of the Mitsubishi Londontown disappeared. So, too, did Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, finished just in time to survive the earthquake but not the wrecking ball some four decades later.

      Among other notable events since Meiji times have been the expansion of the city in 1932 and the amalgamation of city and prefecture in 1943. The eastern Low City still had some life as recently as the 1930s. Asakusa, by the Sumida, was the busiest of centres for popular entertainment. Now it languishes, and there is no such centre in the flatlands—unless one wishes to count the enormously successful Tokyo Disneyland, built on landfill just inside Chiba prefecture at the Edo River mouth.

      Yokohama, being nearer the epicentre of the earthquake, was more grievously damaged than was Tokyo; it was badly damaged again by the bombings. Its past, however, is more of a presence than that of Tokyo. Relics of Meiji, when its history began, are still prominent in the central parts of the city. Coastal Kawasaki continues to be industrial. Both Yokohama and Kawasaki stretch far inland from their coastal origins. The inland parts are residential and largely suburban in character. Efforts by Yokohama since the 1970s to renovate the waterfront area and take on an identity of its own have been more successful than many would have thought possible. The industrialization of Chiba has occurred only since the war. A person dropped off by abductors along the industrial coast of Kanagawa or Chiba prefecture might have trouble knowing which area was which. These coasts may become even more indistinguishable when Kawasaki and Kisarazu (in Chiba prefecture) are linked by the Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway (under construction since 1989).

Additional Reading

R.P. Dore, City Life in Japan (1958, reissued 1973), is a sociological study of a district near the borderline between the plebeian Low City and the moneyed High City. Gary D. Allinson, Suburban Tokyo: A Comparative Study in Politics and Social Change (1979), is a similar study concerning the fringes of the metropolis. Peter Popham, Tokyo: The City at the End of the World (1985); and Paul Waley, Tokyo Now & Then (1984), are lively accounts that convey in ample measure the modern feel of the city. Katharine Sansom, Living in Tokyo (1936), performs the same service for an earlier day. Charles A. Beard, The Administration and Politics of Tokyo: A Survey and Opinions (1923), is a still-relevant survey of the governance of the city.The closest thing to an exhaustive history of the city from its origins down to the recent past is in Japanese: Tōkyō hyakunen-shi, 7 vol. (1972–73), published by the prefectural office; the work of several hands, it is uneven but indispensable. Kato Yuzo (Yuzo Kato) (ed.), Yokohama, Past and Present (1990; originally published in Japanese, 1990), is interesting and helpful, if somewhat diffuse. Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City (1983, reprinted 1991), is a cultural history of Tokyo from the Meiji Restoration of 1867–68 to the great earthquake of 1923, and his Tokyo Rising (1990), takes the story from the earthquake to the date of publication.Edward G. Seidensticker

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