Fifteen Eighty Four

It may be hard to imagine that today’s Tokyo-a vibrant and expansive metropolis home to more than 14 million people-was once a sleepy backwater dotted with fishing villages. But for many centuries, well until the late 1500s, this area was a swampy plain distant from the seats of power. How did this hinterland known as Edo transform so dramatically over the ensuing years, retaining imprints of its long past along the way, to eventually become what we now know as the megacity of Tokyo?

From the late 1500s through the present day, what was Edo and is now Tokyo has been home to different residents-Edoites then Tokyoites who lived, worked, and played in a city as it grew outward then upward. The city itself has had many lives since the sixteenth century, as it metamorphosized from an unassuming collection of fields and modest thatched-roof houses into the shogun’s capital and a thriving early modern city of over a million samurai and townspeople who forged its politics, propelled its economy, and created its popular culture. After the early modern regime fell and shogun and samurai were no more, the newly named Tokyo was refashioned into the capital of a modern nation and soon the heart of an expansive empire. Over the course of the twentieth century, Tokyo would become an emblem of urban cosmopolitanism, an occupied city, and, in the decades after waging a thoroughly destructive war, a sprawling global metropolis.

Tokyo guides the reader through the stories of this dynamic city and those who have called it home. It invites you into this history, whether you are just curious about Tokyo, are planning a trip to the city, want to picture yourself traveling through its past, or want to learn more about a familiar place. This book rejects the notion that the history of Tokyo is somehow mysterious or unknowable, that an “Eastern city” is fundamentally different from London or New York, that its complicated past cannot be understood deeply and empathetically.

The book also rejects the oft-repeated contention that the past cannot be found in contemporary Tokyo, that it’s been erased by earthquakes, fires, war, and new construction. This book makes visible how the past has indelibly shaped how people experience life in the city, and why the veritable pastiche of the urban landscape includes small shops and upscale department stores, narrow alleyways and wide streets, neighborhood grocers and convenience store chains, low-rise structures of wood and high-rise buildings of steel.

Take the Ginza district as one example. Today, at the center of this fashionable area for shopping and entertainment, two boulevards come together at a bustling crossing where you’ll find the high-end Wakō department store, housed in a neo-Renaissance style granite building adorned with a clock tower. In Edo of the 1700s, this was a densely packed neighborhood of modest wooden houses for artisans and merchants that came to house a silver mint-in Japanese, a ginza. In the 1870s, a devastating fire razed the area, prompting the new modern government to envision its recreation as Ginza Bricktown, an emblem of Western-style “civilization” complete with brick buildings, straight and wide streets, and a recently built railroad station nearby. Several decades later, in the 1920s, a devastating earthquake leveled the area and gave birth to an even more consumerist and cosmopolitan Ginza, with dance halls and cafés where patrons could enjoy a drink, listen to jazz, and, for men, chat with young waitresses. While the allure of a modern Ginza was dimmed by fascism and war, then temporarily remade into a place of consumption and leisure for American occupiers, the district would burnish its reputation for elegance in the ensuing postwar decades as the economy grew and most people came to see themselves as belonging to the middle class. This winding, multi-layered history is still very much visible in today’s Ginza with its spacious streets, foreign businesses and boutiques, department stores, European-inspired architecture, and a nightlife animated by the spirit of cafés from decades past.

Ginza Bricktown and the Shinbashi railroad station as imagined by artist Utagawa Kunimasa IV in 1873, in a woodblock print titled Shinbashi tetsudō jōkisha no zu. Courtesy of the Tokyo Metropolitan Library.

With Tokyo, take a journey through the richly textured history of one of the world’s remarkable cities.

Tokyo by Eiko Maruko Siniawer