The Entire History of Tokyo

The Entire History of Tokyo

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The history of Tokyo, Japan’s capital prefecture and largest city, starts with archaeological remains in the area dating back around 5,000 years. Tokyo’s oldest temple is possibly Sensō-ji in Asakusa, founded in 628.

For centuries the region remained a backwater on the eastern edge of Japan, far from the imperial courts at Nara and Kyoto. The settlement’s name, Edo — meaning “estuary” — was adopted by a samurai clan in the twelfth century and the place slowly began to take shape. The decisive early moment came in 1456, when Ota Dokan built a proper castle on the site and began attracting merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. His assassination in 1486 left Edo to be passed between rival clans, but the foundations he laid held.

The transformation from modest castle town to global city was set in motion by one man’s exile. In 1590, following his defeat of the Hojo clan, the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi rewarded — and conveniently removed — his most dangerous ally, Tokugawa Ieyasu, by granting him the eight provinces of the Kanto region. Ieyasu took the neglected castle at Edo and began rebuilding the surrounding marshland into something vast. When his victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 left him master of all Japan, Edo became the seat of his shogunate. By 1721, with a population approaching one million, it was the largest city in the world.

The Edo period that followed was one of enforced peace, rigid social hierarchy, and remarkable cultural energy. The pleasure quarters, the woodblock print artists, the kabuki theatres, and the haiku poets all flourished in the shadow of the shogun’s castle. But the same isolation that made Edo stable made Japan vulnerable, and in 1853 that vulnerability arrived in the form of four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry. The shogunate, unable to resist, signed trading treaties under humiliating conditions. The resulting political crisis toppled the Tokugawa regime entirely, and in 1868 imperial rule was restored under the young Emperor Meiji. Edo was renamed Tokyo — the Eastern Capital — and the emperor moved his court from Kyoto into the old shogun’s castle.

What followed was one of history’s most ambitious programmes of national reinvention. Western architects, engineers, and advisers descended on Tokyo. Railway lines, gas lamps, telegraph cables, universities, and newspapers appeared within years. The samurai class was abolished. By the late Meiji period, Japan had a constitution, a modern military, and an industrial economy, all centred on the new capital.
The twentieth century tested the city twice in quick succession. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, striking at magnitude 7.9 at midday when cooking fires were lit across the city, killed over a hundred thousand people and left two million homeless. Tokyo rebuilt, but barely twenty years later it was destroyed again — this time by American firebombing in March 1945, which killed tens of thousands in a single night and reduced half the city to ash. Japan surrendered in August of that year, and American forces occupied Tokyo for the next seven years, rewriting its constitution and reshaping its institutions from the ground up.

The recovery that followed was extraordinary. Japan’s economy grew at rates that bewildered economists, and Tokyo grew with it — outward across the Kanto plain and upward into a rising skyline. In 1964 the city hosted the Summer Olympics, the first ever held in Asia, a moment that announced Japan’s return to the world. By the 1980s Tokyo was one of the most expensive cities on earth. The speculative bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the Lost Decade stalled the economy — but the city held its character: safe, dense, inventive, and unlike anywhere else.

Today, Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area is home to some 37 million people. From fishing village to feudal capital to bombed-out ruin to global megacity in the space of roughly fourteen centuries — it is a history of perpetual reinvention, driven as much by catastrophe as by ambition.