Tokyo

Tokyo (東京, “eastern capital”) is the capital of Japan since 1868, when the capital was moved from Kyoto. Prior to becoming the capital, the city was named Edo (江戸, meaning "estuary"). Tokyo is the economic, political, educational and cultural center of Japan, and is situated on the eastern coast of the main island of Honshu.

Tokyo by night

Parks

Urban parks became an increasingly common feature of European and American cities in the 19th century and elicited the interest of visiting Japanese leaders. The concept of the urban public park was introduced to Japan by the country's new Meiji oligarchs within the context of the radical reshaping of Tokyo. Representative are two sites. The first is a hill in the north of the city with long-standing associations with the Tokugawa shogunate; the second is a parade ground next to the site of the castle-palace. The hill became a park in name but in practice remained a site for public celebration, while the parade ground was transformed with considerable difficulty and over many years into a consciously fashioned recreational space. The two show the contrasts and hesitations that surrounded changing understandings of the role of the capital city and its shifting symbolic landscapes, as well as the gradual process of domestication of the concept of a public park.

Culture

Museums

The Horyuji Homotsukan [Hall of Horyuji Treasures] of the Tokyo National Museum displays items from the Horyuji temple in Nara Prefecture. Meiji officials sought to implement cultural policies modeled on those they had seen in action in Europe in the 1860's. Machida Hisanari (1839-97), "father" of the National Museum, served both these interests and used the collection to promote the restored monarchy.

Education

Under Tokugawa rule, a limited number of elite schools taught values of literary civilization to encourage discipline within the class of hereditarily-qualified office holders. Schools were storehouses of texts and patronized scholars, serving as waystations for bureaucratic candidates lacking office and for domainal students.

In the Meiji Era, consolidation of the government schools as Tokyo University in 1877 brought a strong emphasis upon introducing new forms of expertise, especially in science and technology. Advanced schools were transformed into centers for academic activities such as research and publication by experts often possessing national reputation. Control over education was delegated to the Ministry of Education, leaving the schools free to concentrate upon developing new forms of expertise. The university was gradually forced onto the stage of national politics. New nationalist epistemologies in the social sciences were introduced, and university scholars began to enter public debate as experts in many areas. The study of law developed rapidly at Tokyo University, making the university the foremost supplier of candidates for bureaucratic office. Thus by the 1880s the university had become an invaluable political instrument to the government bureaucracy.

History

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The Kanto plain was settled by the 3rd millennium BC; modern Tokyo still carries some local names of former villages. Hirakawa-mura, a farming and fishing village on the shores of the Hira river, had a strategic location, commanding land, sea, and river routes along the Kanto plain, In the Yamahura period (c. 12th century), Edo Shigenaga, the military governor of a large Kanto province, erected his castle there, calling it Edojuku. The castle was rebuilt in 1456 by Ota Dokan, shrines and temples were established around it, and merchants developed nearby ferry and shipping routes. By 1590, when the shogun leader Tokugawa Ieyasu selected Edo as his military headquarters, the settlement surrounding Edojuku boasted a mere hundred thatch-roofed cottages. Ieyasu assembled warriors and craftsmen, fortified the Edojuku castle with moats and bridges, and built up the town. After 1603, he became the effective ruler of Japan, Edo became a powerful and flourishing city as the effective national capital, though Japan's imperial seat and official capital remained in Kyoto.

Edo in the Tokugawa era (1603-1867)

The Tokugawa political system rested on both feudal and bureaucratic controls, so that Tokyo lacked a unitary administration. The typical urban social order was composed of warriors, peasants, artisans, and businessmen, the latter two classes organized in officially sanctioned guilds whose number increased with trade and population growth. Because businessmen were excluded from government office, they nurtured a culture of entertainment, making Edo a cultural as well as a political and economic center. Edo was the world's largest city in the 18th century, with a population of over one million in 1800. Edo was a significant force in generating social change and economic growth in Japan during the final two centuries of Tokugawa rule. The city's demand for human and material resources resulted in an appreciable migration of people within Japan, the creation of new markets and marketing patterns, and generated improved standards of performance and new tastes for living better.

The city had two type of land ownership bukechi and chochi. Bukechi was used exclusively by members of the samurai class for residential purposes. There was no system of private landownership, no sales or purchases, and therefore no recognized land value. Chochi, on the other hand, was used by ordinary townspeople, both merchants and craftsmen, for both residential and commercial purposes. Private landownership was recognized and chochi land had agreed values. In the 1870s the Meiji reformers put bukechi land under the same rules as chochi land, thereby sweeping all remnants of feudal class divisions.

Local government in each Edo district was organized under the two highest officials were the machi bugyó, who drew up and issued administrative orders. Next came three full-time administrators, called toshiyori, who were hereditary office-holders. The nanushi, or headmen, were responsible for up to a dozen machi. After 1720, the nanushi were organized into 20 guilds. The had the difficult challenge of protecting the overcrowded city, built of flimsy wood houses; in 1657 a huge fire razed two thirds of the city, causing 100,000 deaths.

Severe sanctions in Edo against those usually known as kawata (derogatorily labeled eta by others) and those labeled hinin (literally "nonhuman") were codified in law and backed by state force. In the city of Edo deliberate political and social processes led to the creation of the Burakumin outcast order in Japan. Even though ideologies of "pollution" and "impurity" may have played a role in determining who was targeted for discrimination, the production of a system of prejudice and intolerance was chiefly the result of deliberate political and economic policies of the ruling class.

The Machikaisho of Tokyo was a warehouse for rice storage that was set up during the Kansei reform period, 1787-33, as a way of ruling Tokyo. This granary provided relief for famished city dwellers and low-interest loans to landowners. Important schools were established, such as Shoheiko (1790) for the study of Confucian classics, Kaiseigo (1885) for western learning, and Igakusho (1863) for the study of occidental medicine. In 1877 they merged to form Tokyo University.

Meiji Era: 1868 to 1941

An attack by imperial troops on Edo followed hard on the defeat of the Tokugawa forces at Toba-Fushimi in January 1868. Edo Castle surrendered in the early spring and the Tokugawa family and retainers were forced by the new regime to depart for Suruga. Edo was renamed Tokyo ["the eastern capital"] and the new Meiji boy emperor arrived in the fall. Bystanders to this political turmoil, the urban poor, caught between rising prices of rice and fish and the downfall of the old bakufu leadership, commented cynically and often humorously on their predicament through newspapers, broadsheets, handbills, and woodblock prints.

Urban planning

In the first two decades of the Meiji period (1868-1912) the country's leaders engaged in intense discussions about the future of the capital of Tokyo. The Fifty-Ward System, was part of the effort by the new government to strengthen control over the people. It preserved the Town Official System and the deliberative organ of representatives of Edo, but dissolved the ruling system of the headmen. It soon gave way to the Large and Small Ward System. Some planners argued for the importance of urban beautification, while others regarded changes in urban infrastructure and services as essential to maintenance and growth of the city. Many of the proposed changes were cloaked in the language of progress. Phillips (1996) examines the course taken by urban leaders of the first decades of the Meiji period in establishing planning policy, using planning documents, transcripts of planning committees, and on architectural and urban design data from completed urban improvement projects in Meiji Tokyo. Phillips (1996) focuses on two issues, (1) the extent to which the efforts of Japanese leaders focused the country on the goal of modernization, and (2) the extent to which efforts to achieve bunmei kaika, or cultural enlightenment, were superficial. He demonstrates how the concepts of modernity and the struggle to develop a modern urban structure altered previous notions of cities and city planning practices. Poor articulation of planning policy in the first decades of the Meiji period reflected a lack of consensus among Meiji leaders about the definition and course of modernization. Rather than reject traditional approaches to planning, urban leaders eventually incorporated these approaches into their new planning methodologies. Modernity in the Japanese context, consequently, did not require dismantling preexisting urban structures. Instead, it represented a marriage of the political motivations of the country's leaders with the modern urban needs for improved transportation networks and zoning mechanisms. Exposure of the political system to popular opinion entailed the shifting of planning discourse from the theoretical to the practical realm, as well as from the private to the public realm.

1923 Kanto earthquake

Ar noon on Saturday 1 September 1923, the eathquake hit, registering 8.3 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was in Sagami Bay, about 80 km south of Tokyo. The earthquake was followed five minutes later by a huge tsunami, with a height of about 12 meters. As fires swept across the city, 75% of all buildings suffered severe structural damage. The quake cut most of the water mains. About 100,000 peopl