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 Tokyo
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Tokyo is a state-of-the-art financial marketplace, where
billions of dollars are whisked electronically around the
globe every day in the blink of an eye. A city of astonishing
beauty in small details, Tokyo also has some of the ugliest
buildings on the planet and generates more than 20,000 tons
of garbage a day.
Life was simpler here in the 12th century, when Tokyo
was a little fishing village called Edo (pronounced "eh-doh"),
near the mouth of the Sumida-gawa on the Kanto Plain.
The Kanto was a strategic granary, large and fertile;
over the next 400 years it was governed by a succession
of warlords and other rulers. One of them, Dokan Ota,
built the first castle in Edo in 1457. That act is still
officially regarded as the founding of the city, but the
honor really belongs to Ieyasu ("ee-eh-ya-su"),
the first Tokugawa shogun, who arrived in 1590. A key
figure in the civil wars of the 16th century.
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By 1680 there were more than a million people here, and
a great city had grown up out of the reeds in the marshy
lowlands of Edo Bay. Tokyo can only really be understood
as a jo-ka-machi -- a castle town. Ieyasu had fought his
way to the shogunate, and he had a warrior's concern for
the geography of his capital. Edo-jo (Edo Castle) had the
high ground, but that wasn't enough; all around it, at strategic
points, he gave large estates to allies and trusted retainers.
These lesser lords' villas would also be garrisons, outposts
on a perimeter of defense.
Farther out, he kept the
barons he trusted least of all -- whom he controlled by
bleeding their treasuries. He required them to keep large,
expensive establishments in Edo; to contribute generously
to the temples he endowed; to come and go in alternate
years in great pomp and ceremony; and, when they returned
to their estates, to leave their families -- in effect,
hostages -- behind.
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All this, the Edo of feudal estates, of villas and
gardens and temples, lay south and west of Edo-jo.
It was called Yamanote -- the Bluff, the uptown.
Here, all was order, discipline, and ceremony; every
man had his rank and duties (very few women were
within the garrisons). Almost from the beginning,
those duties were less military than bureaucratic.
Ieyasu's precautions worked like a charm, and the
Tokugawa dynasty enjoyed 250 years of unbroken peace.
The shogunate was overthrown in 1867. The following
year, Emperor Meiji moved his court from Kyoto to
Edo and renamed it Tokyo: the Eastern Capital. By
now the city was home to nearly 2 million people,
and the geography was vastly more complex. As it
grew, it became not one but many smaller cities,
with different centers of commerce, government,
entertainment, and transportation. In Yamanote rose
the commercial emporia, office buildings, and public
halls that made up the architecture of an emerging
modern state. |
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The firebombings of 1945 left Tokyo, for the most part,
in rubble. That utter destruction could have been an opportunity
to rebuild on the rational order of cities like Kyoto, Barcelona,
or Washington. No such plan was ever made. Tokyo reverted
to type: it became once again an aggregation of small towns
and villages. One village was much like any other; the nucleus
was always the shoten-gai, the shopping arcade. People seldom
moved out of these villages. The vast waves of new residents
who arrived after World War II -- about three-quarters of
the people in the Tokyo metropolitan area today were born
elsewhere -- just created more villages. People who lived
in the villages knew their way around, so there was no particular
need to name the streets.
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Outsiders rarely venture very far into the labyrinths
of residential Tokyo. Especially for travelers, the
city defines itself by its commercial, cultural, and
entertainment centers: Ueno, Asakusa, Ginza, Roppongi,
Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku. Tokyo is still really
two areas, Shitamachi and Yamanote. The heart of Shitamachi,
proud and stubborn in its Edo ways, is Asakusa; the
dividing line is Ginza, west of which lie the boutiques
and depato, the banks and engines of government, the
pleasure domes and caf?s. Today there are 13 subway
lines in full operation that weave the two areas together.
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Tokyo has no remarkable skyline, no prevailing style of
architecture. Many of the buildings are merely grotesque.
In the large scale, Tokyo is not an attractive city --
neither is it gracious, and it is certainly not serene.
The pace of life is wedded to the one stupefying fact
of population: within a 36-km (22-mi) radius of the Imperial
Palace live almost 30 million souls, all of them in a
hurry and all of them ferocious consumers -- not merely
of things but of culture and leisure. The city is a magnet,
and there are very real reasons why it draws so many to
its fascinating and busy core.
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Tokyo
Overview
Japan
Tokyo Information :
