A Short History of Tokyo

By Jonathan Clements

Tokyo, which in Japanese means the “Eastern Capital,” has only enjoyed that name and status for 150 years. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the city that is now Tokyo was a sprawling fishing town by the bay named Edo. Earlier still, in the Middle Ages, it was Edojuku, an outpost overlooking farmlands. And thousands of years ago, its mudflats and marshes were home to elephants, deer, and marine life. 

In this compact history, Jonathan Clements traces Tokyo’s fascinating story from the first forest clearances and the samurai wars to the hedonistic “floating world” of the last years of the Shogunate. He illuminates the Tokyo of the twentieth century with its destruction and redevelopment, boom and bust without forgoing the thousand years of history that have led to the Eastern Capital as we know it. Tokyo is so entwined with the history of Japan that it can be hard to separate them, and A Short History of Tokyo tells both the story of the city itself and offers insight into Tokyo’s position at the nexus of power and people that has made the city crucial to the events of the whole country.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Jul 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913368005

Jonathan Clements

Dr Jonathan Clements is a historian and TV presenter specialising in East Asia. He was visiting professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University in China from 2013 to 2019 and is the author of several books on the history of China, including A Brief History of China, The Art of War: A New Translation, and Confucius: A Biography. His history of the Silk Road and his lives of the First Emperor, Empress Wu and Wellington Koo have all been translated into Chinese. Dr Clements has presented several seasons of Route Awakening (National Geographic), an award-winning television series about icons of Chinese culture.

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Introduction

‘E very view was like a picture on a fan,’ wrote Isabel Anderson of her trip through the Tokyo streets for an audience with the Tashiō Emperor.

We went on past the walled residence of ancient feudal lords; past the torii – the ‘bird-rest’ gates at temple entrances – through which we caught glimpses of stone lanterns and the wide-open fronts of picturesque shrines. Again, we passed tea-houses from which the twang of samisen was heard; and left behind us rows on rows of shops with wares of every kind exposed in front for trade. Everywhere the men and quaint little women went stumbling along on their clicking clogs, bowing low to one another; and every moment through some opening of wall or entrance we could see delightful little gardens of tree and stone and water arranged in a way both fascinating and fanciful.

The year was 1912. Much of Tokyo was a ramshackle slum of low wooden buildings. Parts lay derelict, deserted by the last of the samurai a generation earlier and left to fall into ruin. Others were shanty towns of vagrants, or workshops belching industrial smog, the streets drowned beneath the din of clanking trams and noisy factories. Anderson, the wife of the newly appointed US ambassador, chose to see a fairy-tale Japan straight out of The Mikado, and in doing so managed to encapsulate much of the country’s orientalist appeal to its foreign visitors.

‘Many Japanese will tell you,’ wrote the humourist George Mikes in 1970, ‘that Tokyo is an ugly city. You must not disagree with them because that would be discourteous; you must not agree with them either, because that would be even more discourteous. You say: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ Mourning much of the urban renewal that had accompanied the 1964 Olympics, Mikes thought the place had already gone to the dogs – not that he gave it much of a chance to begin with. ‘London is a galaxy of countless villages,’ he wrote, ‘but Tokyo is an overgrown small town… a dreary conglomeration of houses without a real centre’.

Tokyo, the ‘Eastern Capital’, has only enjoyed that name and status for the last 150 years. Before then it was Edo (meaning ‘Estuary’), a sprawling town by the bay, which was briefly the largest city in the world. Before then, it was the site of Edojuku (meaning ‘Estuary Lodge’), a medieval outpost that kept watch over farming estates. Whereas the imperial court ruled Japan from the sleepy city of Kyōto in the south, the landowners of the plains beyond the mountains held the true wealth and power, which they eventually asserted in a series of civil wars.

In the seventeenth century, the region became the administrative centre of Japan’s Shōgun overlords and the site of a vibrant, vivid urban culture of theatres, taverns and brothels. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it became the true capital, home to the Emperors, seat of government and site of rapid urban growth. Today, Tokyo is home to some 13 million people – or, if one wants to include the suburbs, 37.8 million. To put it another way, this book about a single ‘city’ is obliged to address a contemporary population larger than that of Peru. Nor is it merely a cluster of districts around Tokyo Bay; modern Tokyo’s reach and infrastructure extends deep into nearby Yokohama, Chiba and Saitama, and, thanks to a quirk of political administration, more than 1,000 kilometres to the south along the Ogasawara island chain, all the way to Iwo Jima.

It can be difficult to separate what is required of a history of Tokyo from a history of Japan in general. Tokyo has been a nexus of power and people for a thousand years, which has made it crucial to historical events in the whole country. Throughout the period of the Tokugawa Shōgunate (1600–1868), for example, the enforced attendance of feudal lords in Edo ensured that the city was a crossroads in customs and styles. Whatever the cool kids were doing in the Shōgun’s city soon made it out into the provinces; whatever new fad had caught on in the provinces was sure to be picked up in Edo by the time that season’s samurai had rotated back to their home towns. By the twentieth century such cultural dominance was fixed even more firmly, as radio and then television broadcasts ensured that the capital’s argot, slang and gossip were swiftly transmitted to the periphery.

This can even influence historiography – the story of history itself – since Tokyo is usually the place where visitors are most likely to make landfall. It is Tokyo, for example, where Edward S. Morse first began documenting the archaeology of ancient Japan – but he found it there because he was taking up a post at the Imperial University (now named the University of Tokyo). Later researchers have determined that the earliest extant examples of Jōmon pottery are to be found far to the south, but the original ‘discovery’ was a Tokyo event.

Although all cities see land usages come and go, Tokyo is more susceptible than most to sudden transformations in its appearance. Out in the suburbs, its districts derive their names from farms and roadhouses assimilated by the growing samurai-era sprawl. In 1878, the traveller Isabella Bird wrote in some disappointment to her sister that although she had boarded a train to ‘Tokyo’, she was forced to get off at either Shinagawa or Shinbashi, ‘two of the many villages that have grown together into the capital’. Tokyo, for her, was difficult to point to, a catchall title for a cluster of districts without a real centre or identity.

The outlines of many of Tokyo’s wards were defined by sudden crises – fires, floods or quakes that left pockets of land ripe for renewal. Sometimes these crises have been political: the overnight departure of the samurai lords, leaving their mansion quarter derelict, or the end of the US Occupation, leaving multiple military bases ready for redevelopment. But few of these events have been met with the necessary remedial funding or long-term oversight. After the great earthquake of 1923, Mayor Gotō Shinpei hoped to create a new ultra-modern city, but was forced to cut back until only one of his planned thoroughfares survived. The tangle of small landholdings often makes it difficult to requisition a large enough space for something truly different and wide ranging – only 5% of Tokyo’s space is devoted to parkland, compared to 30% in London.

Many of Tokyo’s place names allude to now-levelled hills, lost river valleys, demolished gates and watch towers or long-since-relocated temples. Centuries of land reclamation have created entirely new districts, walling off former dockyards and clifftops from the sea. Place names commemorate bridges over canals that no longer exist, ‘islands’ that are now a mile from the sea and natural features that are little more than folk memories. Akasaka, meaning ‘Red Slope’, was once a riot of crimson-rooted madder plants. Kamata, the ‘Plum Fields’, was once a wide set of orchards. Nerima, the ‘Tethered Horses’, was the place where samurai cavalrymen once trained their steeds. When the horses were gone, the land was given over to market gardens, and subsequently lent its name to a particular kind of giant radish. When the railways came, the land was prized more for residence and industry, and now only the name remains.

The early modern city was largely constructed from wood, making it relatively easy for certain landmarks to physically move from their original sites. Many historic buildings began in other locations, but have been packed up and relocated at least once – such as the cluster of temples that fled the digging of the Edo Castle moat to be rebuilt in Yotsuya. Close-packed lumber and paper walls also made the city vulnerable to fires, leading to several conflagrations in its history that wiped entire districts off the map. The Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the worst of the air raids of 1945 are only the most recent in a procession of disasters that have altered the city throughout its history, destroying great swathes of its past. Many are the occasions when we Tokyo wanderers find ourselves in a park that was once a slum, a peaceful temple precinct that was once a swamp or an entire district named after a feature that either no longer exists, or never happened. Most notoriously Kabukichō (‘Kabuki Town’) derives its name from a post-war plan to revitalise a ruined area with a kabuki theatre, which never quite made it off the drawing board. Instead, the neighbourhood became a magnet for immigrants and the underclass, and evolved into a centre of organised crime and prostitution – a seedy maze of bars and massage parlours, still retaining the name concocted by its planners. Today, it clings to and rather enjoys this edgy reputation, despite the departure of many of its underworld associations over the last decade.

I have translated many of the meanings of Tokyo place names in an effort to demystify allusions to forgotten events and land uses that are obvious to Japanese speakers. Thus, Saitama is ‘the Land over the Tama River’, Gunma is the place of the ‘Horse Herds’, Toshigi is the place of the ‘Horse Chestnut Trees’ and Ibaraki is the site of the hastily constructed eighth-century stronghold ‘Thornbush Fort’. Sometimes, place names simply derive from forgotten landowners (such as Chiba, the ‘Thousand Leaves’), or even the transcription of old words with a forgotten meaning, such as the Tama River, the name of which has multiple possible origins, none of them confirmed. But where such a provenance is still manifest, I include it in my text. An appreciation of Tokyo’s history is greatly aided by knowing that Ginza was the ‘Silver Mint’ and Odaiba was the ‘Gun Batteries’. These meanings are often immediately apparent to Tokyo locals and, I believe, help bring the city’s historical development to light, even on a contemporary subway trip.

Even old George Mikes changed his mind eventually, conceding that Tokyo wasn’t all bad. ‘Tokyo may lack architectural beauty,’ he confessed, ‘but it has a character and excitement; it is alive. I found it a mysterious and lovable city.’

1

The KantM Plain: Prehistory

to the 1200s

In the beginning, it all came down to sea shells. The earliest settlers were drawn to this area by an abundance of shellfish in the bay. But this fact was lost for millennia – until a chance encounter by a mollusc expert on a train. The American zoologist Edward S. Morse (1838–1925) came to Japan in search of details of western Pacific variants of his beloved brachiopods, and happened to be looking out of the window of his train in 1877 as it passed through the village of Ōmori. Identifying a nearby hillock as an ancient shell midden (because, it is implied, the railway cutting had sliced through it), he tried to contain his excitement over the ensuing months, seemingly in the belief that the world was full of competing mollusc experts desperate to excavate it. Having obtained permission from the railway managers to walk along the line but not to dig, he returned with students from Tokyo Imperial University. Pawing through the upper layers with their bare hands, they soon uncovered worked bones, a clay tablet and ‘a large collection of unique forms of pottery’. Morse was ‘frantic with delight’, sure that he had uncovered ‘evidence of the aborigines of the country’. Someone living 5,000 years ago had been filching shellfish out of the mud of Tokyo Bay, slurping up the contents and throwing the shells on this trash