All cities have histories, but some seem to have histories that attract particular interest, or play an outsized role in shaping their character. Tokyo is, perhaps, one such: there are numerous books examining its past (for example: Tokyo Before Tokyo by Timon Screech or Anna Sherman’s The Bells of Old Tokyo) and even a podcasts-cum-walking tour of what remains of the past in the present city.
Yet in point of fact, Tokyo is not a particularly old city: its origins are in a fortress built in the 1100s, but its real history is probably best traced from the end of the 16th century, when—still known then as Edo—the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu took it as his base. This pales in comparison to the likes of Rome, Athens, or Xi’an, to name but a few. Still, from the time it began to be developed in earnest, the city has had a scale and cultural complexity which makes it genuinely globally significant.
Ten Moments That Shaped Tokyo is the third book in a series by Cambridge University Press which, as the title suggests, takes episodes in a city’s past in order to trace how it came to look like it does today. Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s selection of moments features three from the time the city was known as Edo, four from the period between the 1870s and to 1945, during which it was the capital of a growing nation, then empire, and the remainder from the postwar period, when the city was rebuilt and grew to become the sprawling mass that it is today.
One irony of Tokyo’s history, at least from the perspective of looking at the past-in-the-present, is that many of the major events of Tokyo’s history have been acts of destruction. There are three such examples in the book: the Ansei earthquake of 1855, the great Kanto quake of 1923, and then the incendiary bombing of the Second World War. Although the city had dramatically changed over the nearly 100 years between the first and last of these, still much about the bombing of World War 2 Tokyo would have been familiar to the residents of Tokugawa era Edo: the speed with which fire could rip through tightly clustered wooden buildings, the chaos and disorder of thousands suddenly made homeless, and eventually the need to find the resources with which to rebuild.
The destruction did allow opportunities for improvement; it also revealed, in 1923, that the European style brick buildings of Ginza which had represented the modern pride of the city, were particularly weak in the face of earthquakes. By contrast, the few buildings made in a new material, reinforced concrete, held up fairly well.
One of the most striking elements of Tokyo’s development over its recent history is its growth. Nine of the ten key moments in this book are focused on locations within the 23 central wards, and contained within the circular Yamanote railway line. This is understandable — until recently this was the city: what are now central locations such as Shinagawa or Shinjuku, once represented its fringes. The first railway line, linking Tokyo to another town, Yokohama, which forms the focus of one chapter, now runs through a single urban sprawl with no sense of a gap between two separate cities.
Tokyo is a city located on a marshy estuary, where reclaiming boggy ground was integral to its very beginnings. In the Tokugawa period, as the seat of the Shogunal government, it drew settlers from across the nation. Still, the growth and sheer scale of modern Tokyo (as with other mega-cities across the world) is without precedent in its past.
The relationship between Tokyo’s past and its present is somewhat ambivalent. It is a city constantly being rebuilt even when disasters do not intervene, and yet certain sites and the activities which take place there—the Imperial Palace, the temple complex at Sensoji, the department stores at Ginza—retain a deep connection to the past. In some places, only the names remain to hint at the richness of their pasts, but there are less tangible but no less real continuities in the everyday lives of Tokyo’s residents and the streets they inhabit.
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