Tokyo

Although it has been commonplace to refer to Tokyo as a new “global city,” ever since Saskia Sassen described it that way in her well-known book on global cities, in fact Tokyo has been a global city for centuries. Like Paris and London, Tokyo has long been positioned as the political, economic, and cultural capital of a nation, as well [Page 1653]as its showcase to the rest of the world. But there are few major cities that have gone through such dramatic transformations in social, economic, and physical morphology as Tokyo.

The shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu established Tokyo (then known as Edo) as his capital in 1590 and built up the city into a centralized castle town under the sankin koutai policy, requiring local daimyo lords to maintain an expensive mansion presence within the city. The samurai and daimyo administrative functions were gathered in the high-town (Yamanote), while the commoners, craftspeople, and retainers were concentrated into the soggy plains of the low-city (Shitamachi), in haphazard wooden structures that were as cramped as they were fire-prone. This centralization of power, capital, and culture led to a growth in population from a few thousand in 1600 to more than 1.3 million by 1720, making Tokyo the largest city in the world at the time. (By contrast, London's population was just 600,000 and Beijing's just under a million.)

The U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry's “Black Ships” arrived in 1853 in Tokyo Bay to force an end to Japan's 250 years of self-imposed isolation and the imminent end of the country's deteriorating feudal system. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration was enacted. Edo was renamed Tokyo (“Eastern Capital”) and unified under the emperor Meiji with a new policy of looking outward, specifically to the West. The new emperor sat at the center of radial patterns of power and privilege, and a metropolis of castles, canals, and bridges, built around views of Mount Fuji, was overlaid by a bureaucratic apparatus of modern government that generated a new central business district.

The streets of Tokyo could be read as Japan's uneven attempt to overlay “Western learning” onto the surface of the deep structure of Japanese urban culture and space. The area around what is today the world-famous fish market in Tsukiji was the first foreigners' settlement, which connected to, but kept at arm's length, outside influence. A series of Western-inspired architectural projects, most notably in the anachronistic and mold-filled Ginza Brick Quarters and the lavish Rokumeikan, became icons of Japanese mastery of the technologies of modernization. With little substantive contact with outside nations, Tokyo became a showcase for a Western gaze that Japan anticipated and hoped to manage.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, while wiping out much of the city, also provided city father Goto Shinpei, with the advice of New York city planner Charles Beard, an opportunity to rebuild the city in a way that was supposed to incorporate “scientific methods” of city planning and public administration: wider streets, improved infrastructure, and rationalization of the hodgepodge collection of neighborhoods and districts that had defined Tokyo for centuries. However, as before, the result was a number of more modern faces for public and international consumption, leaving a backstage of Japanese urban life relatively untouched.

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