Who ruled Tokyo?

Tokyo stands at the head of Tokyo Bay on the Kantō plain, the largest stretch of flat land in Japan, where several rivers, among them the Sumida and the Tama, reach the sea. Until 1868 the city was called Edo, meaning roughly "estuary" or "bay entrance". It was a minor castle town until 1590, when Tokugawa Ieyasu made it his base; within a little over a century it had become among the biggest cities on earth. Its history since then has been one of repeated destruction and rebuilding, through fire, earthquake and war, and of steady growth into the core of one of the most populous metropolitan areas on earth.

People have lived around the bay since the Jōmon period, and shell mounds found at Ōmori in 1877 helped begin Japanese archaeology. In the early centuries CE the area formed part of the province of Musashi, a frontier region far from the imperial capitals of Nara and Kyoto; the Buddhist temple Sensō-ji in Asakusa traditionally dates its founding to 628. A local warrior family took the name Edo in the twelfth century. In 1457 the warrior Ōta Dōkan built the first Edo Castle on a bluff above the bay, but the settlement around it remained small, passing to the Hōjō clan in the sixteenth century.

After Toyotomi Hideyoshi defeated the Hōjō in 1590, he gave their Kantō lands to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who moved into Edo Castle. Victory at Sekigahara in 1600 made Ieyasu the most powerful man in Japan, and in 1603 he became shogun. The emperor remained in Kyoto, but Edo became the real seat of government of the Tokugawa shogunate. Hills were levelled, marshes filled and canals dug, and the castle grew into the largest in Japan. Under the system of alternate attendance, every feudal lord had to spend part of his time in Edo and leave his family there, which filled the city with samurai households, servants and merchants. By the early eighteenth century Edo probably had over a million inhabitants.

Fire was the city's great hazard. The Great Fire of Meireki in 1657 destroyed most of Edo, including much of the castle, and killed tens of thousands, perhaps as many as 100,000. The rebuilt city had wider streets and firebreaks. The merchant quarters of the low city, the shitamachi, produced a flourishing popular culture of kabuki theatre, woodblock prints and pleasure districts.

In 1868 the shogunate fell in the Meiji Restoration. Edo Castle was surrendered without a battle, the city was renamed Tokyo, "eastern capital", and Emperor Meiji moved into the castle, which became the Imperial Palace. Railways, brick buildings, universities and ministries turned Tokyo into the centre of a modernising state as the capital of the Empire of Japan. On 1 September 1923 the Great Kantō earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed much of the city and killed over 100,000 people in the region. In the Second World War American firebombing devastated Tokyo again; the raid of 9 to 10 March 1945 alone killed some 100,000 people.

After the war Tokyo rebuilt at speed. The 1964 Summer Olympics, the first held in Asia, coincided with the opening of the bullet train to Osaka and new expressways, and the city became the financial centre of a booming economy. Tokyo hosted the Olympics again in 2021, a year late because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city itself has about 14 million people, and the greater Tokyo area well over 30 million, one of the largest urban populations in the world and the political and economic heart of Japan.