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Watch our Tokyo Guide at https://brighttrip.com/tokyo
Leave a comment with any questions you have and we’ll make sure to include it in a future video.
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Michael Thornton's (@dr_maikeru) Paper: https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Reform-Early-Modern-Studies/dp/1793641897
RESOURCES:
Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology by Hidenobu Jinnai https://meijiat150dtr.arts.ubc.ca/essays/grunow/
https://wattention.com/wtt32-edo-castle/
https://www.ndl.go.jp/landmarks/e/edo/meguro-shirogane-atari-no-ezu.html
https://japanthis.com/rivers-of-edo-tokyo/
Written, edited, and animated by @DanielsimsSteiner
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0:00
Tokyo can very easily be overwhelming
0:03
It's associated with a handful of superlatives like the most populous city in the world
0:08
home to the busiest train station, or the busiest street crossing. The Tokyo of today is the result of centuries of development and the combination of a bunch of settlements
0:18
So I want to focus in on the foundation of where all this began
0:30
Let's take just a second to get oriented. The city sits right here, on the eastern coast of Japan, next to Tokyo Bay
0:37
Zooming out a bit, you can see it lies along the Pacific Rim, in what's known as the Ring of Fire
0:42
This is the edge of a tectonic plate, and it's along this rim where 80% of the world's seismic activity
0:47
and 75% of the world's volcanic activity occurs, both of which characterize Japan
0:54
Due to the earthquakes and volcanoes, three-fourths of Japan is mountainous. However, the basin that Tokyo sits in is unusually flat
1:03
In my mind, it was inevitable that this spot would be home to a major city
1:08
Another important element of understanding the city is its water. There are four major rivers that run down from the mountains through the city and empty into the bay
1:17
The combination of these and the topography of the city make it very prone to flooding
1:22
This, plus a devastating bombing during World War II, means that it can be hard to find
1:27
old buildings in downtown Tokyo. But what does remain is much of the original street layout
1:33
This is a topographical map of Tokyo. If I zoom in, you can see these unnatural waterways that are part of the current city
1:40
These were built hundreds of years ago to serve as a moat for a castle that stood here
1:45
Edo Castle. Today, the Imperial Palace stands on these grounds, and the surrounding greenery is a
1:52
is a great anchor point when looking at a current map of the city
1:56
The year 1603 marks the beginning of the Edo period, when a new ruler came into power and
2:01
moved the military capital of Japan from Kyoto to Edo, which is modern day Tokyo
2:08
Okay, before I get too deep into these maps of Tokyo, I want to thank Surfshark for sponsoring
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Personally, I don't travel without using my VPN. With your one account of Surfshark
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you can use it across all of your devices. So it can be on your iPad, your phone
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and your laptop all while you're traveling. I also actually use Surfshark at home
2:49
for swapping out my physical location for a digital private network. that will show that I'm in Canada or in Portugal
2:57
even though I'm in the United States. This allows me to access content on sites like Netflix
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that isn't available in my region. The office, I'm looking at you
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And if you don't like the service, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link for this is under the like button
3:17
at the top of the description. And we will hop into our video about Tokyo
3:22
In videos I've made of other cities, there's often a clear pattern to the street layout
3:28
In New York, for example, there was the 1811 Commissioner's Plan that laid the city out in the clean grid of streets and avenues
3:36
In San Francisco, I talked about how the streets are named after states in alphabetical order
3:41
But Tokyo is much more complex and irregular than most western cities
3:47
There are portions like this that are pretty close to a grid system
3:51
but other parts are completely irregular. And not only do many of these streets lack a pattern
3:58
but more often than not they also lack a name. As someone mostly familiar with western cities
4:04
this blew my mind. But it doesn't mean there isn't a reason
4:09
and a method behind the streets and their addresses. Let me explain
4:14
Until about 150 years ago Japan had a very clear caste system
4:18
and this social structure had a large influence on where people lived and how each neighborhood
4:25
functioned. If you lived in a lower caste as a commoner, you would live in much more tightly
4:31
packed neighborhoods that resulted in something closer to a grid system, like this area right here
4:37
If you were in the military, you would have lived closer to the shogun and you would have more land
4:43
And if you were a lower level samurai, you would live east of the Shogun
4:47
since east is viewed as the unlucky direction in Feng Shui. And something else becomes a lot more clear
4:54
when we overlay the topographical map You can see that this same neighborhood is in this green area meaning it lower in elevation A lot of the area that sort of light blue was actually still water back in the 16th century
5:07
when Edo was first being developed, and so you really had the castle
5:11
kind of on the edges of Tokyo Bay. This is Michael Thornton, who's an assistant professor of history
5:17
at Northeastern University. Is that an original, that's the original map? Yeah, yeah
5:22
That's awesome. And he helped me understand a little bit of how this works. Tokyo can be divided into the high city and the low city
5:29
On the tops of the hills, these red areas, buildings are less vulnerable to floods and earthquakes
5:35
So this is where people of higher class built. Then as the city grew
5:39
the lower places filled in with commoners. So all these areas over here that are below sea level
5:45
are the poorest districts of Tokyo in 2023. These moats visible on both old maps of Edo
5:52
and current maps of Tokyo are another example of how the city was different from the start
5:57
Rather than a strong city wall, this acted as the main defense
6:01
Having a big grid with open wide avenues is not great for defending the place
6:05
There was never really any wall building. Instead, it's kind of the confusing street system
6:10
and all the moats and this sort of interlocking pattern. Those were used as the defensive mechanisms
6:15
rather than a wall. Portions of it have been covered by roads, but if you know what to look for
6:20
when you're walking around in the area, you can actually find stones from the original moat
6:24
Some of them have plaques that talk a little bit more about it. And I found this YouTube video
6:29
of this guy that walks all over Tokyo and just shows stuff like this. So you should check out his channel
6:34
It's really cool. In fact, Sotoboridori right here means outer moat avenue
6:40
And this neighborhood, Maronozzi, means within the circle. These are some of the many elements of this old Edo
6:48
that still surface in modern day Tokyo. As Edo was built, so was a network of five long roads
6:54
stretching across much of Japan, called Gokaido, that connected the country as it unified
6:59
for the first time in centuries. These five roads all merged right here at Nihonbashi Bridge
7:08
Most of the original roads are gone, along with the original wooden bridge
7:13
but today a bridge by the same name still stands in this place
7:17
and serves as the point that all places in Japan are measured from
7:22
Because of its position on the bay and the moats around the city that could be utilized for transport it really was more a place of commerce than it ever was for defense While Edo was never really attacked by outsiders it didn avoid large destruction
7:39
In 1657, a huge fire burned through most of the city. At the time, the residents were required to live within the moat boundary
7:47
so it was tightly packed and over 100,000 people died. This fire had a huge impact on the city
7:55
The shogun allowed the residents to begin to spread out to the other side of the moat
8:00
beginning an expansion that wouldn't stop for hundreds of more years. Also, just a quick side note, almost every video I've made, a massive city-wide fire has played a role
8:12
Chicago, New York, San Francisco. I was also in Lisbon last summer and a bunch of the buildings have these like fireproof walls that
8:22
are really important there. It just makes me think a lot about fire policies, fire escapes were
8:27
implemented, building materials. Anyway, back to Edo. Unfortunately, this was not the only destruction
8:34
to strike the city. It continued to expand by building but also by incorporating nearby
8:39
settlements, which added to the randomness of the roads. In 1923, a 7.9 earthquake devastatingly
8:47
shook the entire city, and more than just the shaking, the fires that followed once again
8:53
leveled the city. A few decades later, most of the buildings were destroyed again by U.S. bombing
8:59
during World War II. When you look for information about Tokyo, you'll quickly find things about the
9:08
metro system, about World War II, the post-war miracle, and the hosting of the Olympics
9:15
But the small foundation and ancient social structure of this sprawling metropolis still
9:21
pulls weight in where people live in the city and how it's organized
9:26
Thank you guys so much for watching this video. We have an entire guide to Tokyo on brighttrip.com
9:31
where we talk all about how ramen is made, how you can order sushi, how to travel there with kids
9:36
the nightlife, the shopping, public transportation, tons of info over there. We'll see you at
9:40
brighttrip.com. I also left a bunch of links in the description for resources I used for making
9:45
this video that I highly recommend checking out as well as the Surfshark 83% off and three months
9:52
free link. So that's all under the like button and we'll see you in the next video very soon. Peace
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