attacking enemy. The seemingly random pattern of Tokyo streets today is a survival of this early urban planning.
Edo became the greatest castle in the land. The city grew rapidly as the daimyo built homes within the castle walls, alternating residence between their provincial domains and mandatory attendance on the shogun in Edo. With the influx of daimyo and samurai troops, the need for a service class increased. Tokugawa leyasu invited merchants and artisans to the city, assigning them quarters in the eastern marshes by the sea, now the lands stretching west and southwest from Hibiya. Dirt from the top of Surugadai, one of Tokyo's larger hills, was provided to start the process of reclamation from the sea that continues today. By the 1700s, the population of Edo was close to a million, making it possibly the largest city in the world at the time.
The conservative Edo period government legally enforced a strict division of classes, placing the samurai at the top and the theoretically unproductive merchant at the bottom. But the urban samurai had become utterly dependent, and increasingly indebted to, the merchant class. Despite government efforts to enforce the status quo, the merchants continued to prosper. Restricted to shitamachi, the crowded downtown districts, from the merchant and artisan classes emerged a culture that was as vibrantly creative as it was unabashedly vulgar. In the amusement quarters of the city, the merchants escaped from the pressures of the rigid social system and the demands of business. Under their patronage, the arts flourished—the Bunraku and Kabuki theaters, geisha, and ukiyoe-style prints were all products of the time.
Tokugawa rule ended shortly after the arrival in Tokyo Bay of Commodore Matthew Perry and the United States Navy in 1953. Unable to protect the country from the "Southern Barbarians," the government lost its claim to legitimacy. A coalition of powerful families from the southern and western provinces seized power from the shogunate, and in the 1868 Meiji Restoration reestablished Imperial rule. The Emperor was moved to Edo castle and the city renamed Tokyo—the "eastern capital."
The new government quickly realized that national security could best be achieved by meeting the West on its own terms, and a program was undertaken to promote rapid modernization. Things Western were adopted and praised as far superior to Japanese. Foreign experts were sought and extravagantly paid. Tokyo took on a new air as brick buildings, trains, and tailored suits came into vogue.
Patterns of urban use also changed. The daimyo packed up and moved back to the provinces leaving vast stretches of vacant land in the castle areas. No longer confined to shitamachi, the wealthy merchants moved to the western, hilly parts of town. Without their patronage, the arts and entertainment forms of Edo popular culture lost their major source of support. The old pleasure quarters and theaters fell on hard times and shitamachi was left to the poor.
Tokyo continued to grow, and by the 1920s had a population of over two million. Then in 1923 came the Great Kanto Earthquake. The earthquake, and the fires and tidal waves that followed, left nearly 140,000 people dead and half of the city destroyed. Tokyo was rebuilt and in less than ten years the population was again at pre-earthquake levels. In 1932, the city limits were expanded to the current twenty-three wards, boosting the population another two million.
The city has suffered over the years from a variety of natural and unnatural disasters—in the Edo period from over five hundred major fires, from floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and in 1945 from the fire bombings of World War II. Each time, the people reconstructed the city and resumed their lives with a stoic resilience. Tokyo has never had a tradition of permanence.
Now the second largest city in the world, Tokyo sprawls across more than eight hundred square miles of the Kanto Plain. As an urban environment, the capital shows little concern for outward appearances, and evokes neither the alien exoticism of an Asian city, nor the sense of wonder and awe one expects from a city of its size and international importance. But while Westerners build monuments to the future, the Japanese have built and rebuilt for the present. The chaos of the city today is the function of an attitude that puts the exigencies of survival above all other concerns. A major earthquake has been predicted in Tokyo. They happen every sixty years or so; the last one was in 1923, and the next is already overdue. The city keeps building its functional modern high-rises and just waits.
Yet the "technopolitan" Tokyo of first impressions is really just a thin veneer that hides what remains in essence a city of villages. Within walking distance of almost any of the city's major districts are back-street neighborhoods where life operates pretty much the same as in any small suburban community. Shops and homes line the narrow wandering streets where children play and grandmothers chat at the corner fruit stand. The man next door waters his street-side garden in his pajamas each morning and the tofu seller tours the neighborhood in the evening by bicycle, calling out to the local housewives with his distinctive horn.
The districts and neighborhoods that divide Tokyo make it a city of varied pleasures and endless discovery. Each has a history, each growing up at a different stage in the life of the city. Some, aging, are museums of the past; others are still in the first neon flush of youth.
THE DISTRICTS
Roppongi
The most international district in Tokyo, Roppongi is famous as one of the city's major nightlife districts. Less expensive and established than Ginza and Akasaka, more sophisticated than Shinjuku and Shibuya, Roppongi claims some of the best restaurants, bars and nightclubs, and a crowd with more blond hair and blue eyes than any other part of town.
It is also one of the city's high-rent residential areas, a reputation the area has had since the Edo period. One theory on the original of the district's "six trees" name claims that six Edo-period samurai, whose names included the character for tree, lived in the neighborhood. In the Meiji period the area was inhabited by wealthy Japanese and foreigners connected with the newly established embassies. Later the military set up camp toward Nogizaka where the Self-Defense Force headquarters are located today. After the war more foreigners moved in as embassies relocated to the area, and the U.S. military established a base on part of the former Japanese Army lands. It was still a quiet district, notable for a street car running along the main thoroughfare and a few Western-style bars and restaurants serving burgers and pizza.
During the late fifties and early sixties, as the post-war prosperity took hold, the Japanese began to look beyond the need for survival, and the traditional values propagated by the nationalistic wartime government. Roppongi, with its international air, attracted the new cosmopolitan Japanese. In a few cafes and bars—Nicola's, Gino's, and the still famous Chianti—gathered the liberal elite of intellectuals, entertainers, fashion designers, and other notables. The district's popularity grew, more bars and restaurants opened, and the young Japanese who frequented the area were dubbed the Roppongi-zoku—the Roppongi people.
Life in Roppongi starts at the Roppongi crossing and its tribute to the Japanese love of coffee shops and kitsch architecture—the famous Almond (pronounced amando)—a multi-story pink coffee shop with some of the worst coffee and cakes in town. This is, however, a major landmark and the corner in front a favorite rendezvous spot.
By day, Roppongi is relatively quiet—nothing seems to be open before 11:00 A.M. Worth visiting are the Axis Building, full of shops specializing in contemporary interior goods, and Wave, one of the first high-tech record shops in the world.
A short walk down the hill from the main crossing is Azabu-juban, a neighborhood shopping area that grew up as a textile center producing linen cloth, asa, from which the area gets its name. Restaurants, bars, and discos are moving to this area in increasing numbers although it remains a cozy shopping street by day.
Nishi Azabu—Hiro-o
As Roppongi reached a virtual nightclub saturation point in the early eighties, the fallout from the its burgeoning prosperity drifted into some of the city's residential and warehouse districts. At one point it seemed that nearly every really hip bar was located in Nishi Azabu. It is still a neighborhood rich in great restaurants and bars.
More residential than the Kasumi-cho area, Hiro-o has typically had the rather dubious reputation of being the "gaijin ghetto" (gaijin means "foreigner") of the city. Expensive company-subsidized apartment complexes are full of foreign executives and their families, while two large Western-style supermarkets