Tokyo

Japan's capital comprises cities of packed streets, neon logos and the ancient tucked away alongside the modern.
Photo © by Sonny Santos, used by permission.

Tokyo (東京 Tookyoo), Japan's capital, is often thought of as a single city, lying at the heart of the world's most heavily populated region. However, Tokyo is really a metropolitan region, a network of many cities and communities, sprawling outwards across the Kanto region of Honshu island. The population was 12,659,000 in 2006, with millions more within the Greater Tokyo Area.

Literally meaning 'East Capital', Tokyo has been Japan's de facto capital only since 1868, at a time when the country was ending hundreds of years of self-imposed isolation. Its original name was Edo (江戸), meaning 'estuary'; the city grew in power and prestige over the centuries, eventually becoming the capital on the move of the Emperer Meiji (明治天皇 Meiji-tennoo) from Kyoto.

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

Tokugawa era (1603-1868)

During the Tokugawa era (1603-1868) severe sanctions 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.

=1868 to 1941

1923 Kanto earthquake

In the immediate aftermath of the devastating 1923 earthquake, hundreds - perhaps thousands - of Korean residents in Japan were massacred. Animosity toward Koreans was fueled by rumors of Korean wrongdoing after the quake. Some non-Koreans were murdered as well, but Koreans became the specific targets because of their distinct Korean identity, rather than simply because they were not Japanese. The Japanese colonial occupation of Korea provided the backdrop to this extreme example of the explosion of racial prejudice into violence, based on a history of antagonism. To be a Korean in 1923 Japan was to be not only despised, but also threatened and potentially killed.

In contrast to London, where typhoid fever had been steadily declining since the 1870s, the decline in Tokyo did not begin until the late 1920s in Japan. Within the city of Tokyo, the rate of typhoid morbidity was higher in the upper-class residential northern and western districts than in the densely populated working-class eastern district. An explanation is the decline of waste disposal, which became particularly serious in the northern and western districts when traditional methods of waste disposal collapsed due to urbanization. The great Kanto earthquake (1923) had a major long-term impact on the city's rate of typhoid morbidity. Although the level of morbidity rose to a record high due to unsanitary conditions following the earthquake, it prompted the establishment of antityphoid measures and the building of urban infrastructure.

World War II

As a major wartime metropolis. The experience of everyday life in Tokyo dramatically changed with munitions-based heavy industrialization and the loss of liberties and urban culture as the state mobilized for total war. The sensitive issue of how to defend the capital from air attack then became a pressing concern for urban planners, government officials, and even fiction writers. While the government assigned Tokyoites the responsibility of protecting the Imperial capital, devastating American fire bombing raids revealed in an instant the impossibility of carrying out such a task.

The 9 March 1945 raid by the US Army Air Forces against Tokyo marked a turning point in the American strategic air war against Japan. Previously, most raids were "precision" raids that used high explosives against industrial targets; thereafter, most raids were "area" raids that used incendiary bombs to burn Japanese cities and kill civilians. The strategic shift did not depart radically from the air war in Europe or from prewar planning. Headquarters had always intended for Curtis LeMay to lead the air campaign against Japan and had always viewed incendiary raids against cities and American policy since the 1930s had focused on the burning of Tokyon--and the killing of civilian war workers--as a way to destroy an enemy's industrial capability.

After a long interval of silence, private memories of the catastrophic fire bombings became public when air raid survivors and others joined together to write a history of the raids and then attempt to build a museum from which to transmit the experience of war.

1945-1970

The destroyed metropolis became the base from which the United States under Douglas MacArthur administered Japan for several years. During this period there emerged two Tokyos. In one, the occupiers appropriated and transformed key sections of the city in ways that allowed them to partake in the spoils of war and live in luxury. In the other, Tokyoites struggled to stave off starvation and to secure housing and employment.

1970 to present

The Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 had a far-reaching impact on the national identity of Japan. The nation's wounded psyche and reputation from World War II was significantly healed. Rapid social changes, thematically staged in the Olympic ceremonies, enabled Japan to display an inclusive and comprehensive national pride, and underscored Japan's re-entry into the circle of developed industrial countries. The 1964 ancient arts exhibition put on by the Tokyo National Museum to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics provided an opportunity to promote Japan's traditional culture to foreign visitors and to the Japanese people themselves, as part of an effort to regain normalized status in the international community.

In early-21st-century Tokyo, the construction of luxury residential and commercial towers in neighborhoods along the Sumida River has accelerated dramatically, altering the social composition and cultural images associated with downtown Tokyo. The new buildings stand in contrast to the sinking economy and are markers of the growing gap between rich and poor. They also reflect the pattern of urban construction and destruction as well as the unobtainable desires promised by commodity capitalism.

The Japanese media have featured articles on the escalation of youth crime and discontent, as well as the many forms of corruption that teenagers are exposed to in transformed downtown Tokyo. The 2002 Naoki literary prize was awarded to a book that reacts to both urban development and the problems facing Tokyo adolescents - Ishida Ira's 4-Teen (2002). Ishida shows the effects of Tokyo's transformations on teenage social norms and uses descriptions of urban places to reveal contradictions embedded in these roles. This article examines the context of 4-Teen's publication and the awarding of the Naoki Prize and explores how stories that mix fiction and historical experience provide new ways of viewing the changes in Tokyo.

Bibliography

Guides

• DK. Tokyo (2008) excerpt and text search
• Frommer's Tokyo(2008) excerpt and text search
• Yanagihara, Wendy. Lonely Planet Tokyo Encounter (2007) excerpt and text search

Contemporary

• Waley, Paul. "Tokyo-as-world-city: Reassessing the Role of Capital and the State in Urban Restructuring." Urban Studies 2007 44(8): 1465-1490. Issn: 0042-0980 Fulltext: Ebsco

History

• Cybriwsky, Roman. Tokyo: The Shogun's City at the Twenty-first Century. (1998). 260 pp.
• Freedman, Alisa D. "Tracking Japanese Modernity: Commuter Trains, Streetcars, and Passengers in Tokyo Literature, 1905-1935." PhD dissertation U. of Chicago 2002. 300 pp. DAI 2002 63(4): 1347-A. DA3048377 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Griggs, M. Pierce. "From Civilizing to Expertizing Bureaucracy: Changing Educational Emphasis in Government-Supported Schools of Tokyo (Edo) during the Tokugawa Period and Early Meiji Era." PhD dissertation U. of Chicago 1997. 303 pp. DAI 1998 58(10): 4031-A. DA9811860 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Karacas, Cary Lee. "Tokyo from the Fire: War, Occupation, and the Remaking of a Metropolis." PhD dissertation U. of California, Berkeley 2006. 333 pp. DAI 2007 67(8): 3111-A. DA3228373 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• McClain, James L., John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, eds. Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (1994)
• Miller, Ian Jared. "The Nature of the Beast: The Ueno Zoological Gardens and Imperial Modernity in Japan, 1882-1945." PhD dissertation Columbia U. 2004. 273 pp. DAI 2007 68(1): 304-A. DA3249167 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Phillips, David Peter. "Intersections of Modernity and Tradition: An Urban Planning History of Tokyo in the Early Meiji Period (1868-1888)." PhD dissertation U. of Pennsylvania 1996. 241 pp. DAI 1996 57(4): 1879-A. DA9627986 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Raz, Aviad E. Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland. (1999). 240 pp.
• Siebert, Loren. "Using GIS to Document, Visualize, and Interpret Tokyo's Spatial History." Social Science History]] 2000 24(3): 536-574. Issn: 0145-5532 online
• Tajima, Kayo. "The Marketing of Urban Human Waste in the Edo/Tokyo Metropolitan Area: 1600-1935." PhD dissertation Tufts U. 2005. 189 pp. DAI 2005 66(3): 1123-A. DA3167536 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Takenaka-O'Brien, Akiko. "The Aesthetics of Mass-Persuasion: War and Architectural Sites in Tokyo, 1868-1945." PhD dissertation Yale U. 2004. 549 pp. DAI 2004 65(3): 730-A. DA3125312 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

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See also

• Greater Tokyo Area
• Kanto
• Honshu
• Japan