Tokyo: A Biography. Stephen Mansfield
river stones and haniwa. Excavations of its one stone and two wooden coffins revealed a trove of relics, including swords, iron arrowheads, armor, armlets, iron sickles, bronze mirrors, and combs. The quality of the relics and the scale of the tomb indicate that this was the resting place of a powerful chieftain based in the southern Musashino area. The keyhole-shaped Horaisan Kofun, in nearby Tamagawa, is Tokyo’s oldest tomb, dating from the fourth century. Its burial relics attest to the existence of a ruler who controlled much of the Tama River region.
If geography and climate define habitat, it was inevitable that people would settle within the eight provinces that made up the Kanto plain. The largest region of flatland in Japan, its location on the eastern seaboard placed it at the furthest distance from potential enemies invading from continental Asia. As it was well-irrigated, it was ideal for the cultivation of rice and for the training of horses in the employ of warriors.
The site of the villages from which Tokyo would emerge straddles three rivers—the Sumida, the Arakawa, and the Edogawa— as they flow over the flat alluvial lowland before discharging into Tokyo Bay. This broad swath of land, barely above sea level, is highly prone to flooding and other disasters; it has been the subject of countless calamities and will likely be so again. Much of the shore was marshy, but when the area was developed in the late sixteenth century, land reclamation projects solidified the shoreline, adding space to the future city.
As river courses altered and geological shifts and changes in sea levels occurred, upland plains formed. The biggest landmass of this sort is the Musashino plateau, a diluvial plain running 60 kilometers west of the city center to the mountainous edges of the Kanto plain. Its escarpments penetrate into the city, creating a clearly defined geography separating the flat, low-lying sections of the city close to the bay and river estuaries called the shitamachi (low city) from the rising inland zones called the yamanote (high city). The zonal distinction extends far beyond geography.
The areas comprising present-day Tokyo were not entirely uninhabited; early Korean communities were said to have settled along the Sumida River. On March 18 in the year 628—a surprisingly concise date—an event took place that would presage the rise of a city that was not just martial, but also devotional. Hinokuma Takenari and his brother Hamanari, both fishermen, found a small gold statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, tangled in their nets. According to the story, they threw the image back into the river, only to witness it reappear. When the image was taken to their liege, Haji-no-Nakatomo, he interpreted the incident as auspicious, and built a hall in his home to enshrine the deity. Completed in 645, the Asakusa Kannon temple may be the oldest religious site in the city. The diminutive statue became a hibutsu, a hidden image—one too sacred to set eyes on. The origin of the icon remains a mystery, but a possible explanation surfaced in 1945, just after the firebombing of the temple, when the remains of the main hall were being excavated. Religious implements and tiles of continental Asian origin dating from the seventh and eighth century were found, hinting at the possibility that the statue is of Korean provenance.
The flatness of the Musashino plateau, in a country where mountains are revered, seems to have inspired despondent thoughts, its very vastness a limitation, as this ancient poem implies:
The Musashino plain,
Where there are few mountains
For the moon to approach.
Rising gibbous from the loam,
It sinks back into the grass.
The twelve-year-old Lady Sarashina crossed the Sumida River one gusty autumn day in 1020, noting, as her entourage was swallowed up by the expanse of grasses, that the reeds were so tall that the “very tips of the horsemen’s bows were invisible.” The principal characteristic of the plain—its dense overgrowth of grasses, pampas, wild bush clover, and reeds—was documented over the centuries in poetry. Clear skies, the moon, and Mount Fuji— easily visible from the plain—were subjects of a number of later paintings. In one pair of six-fold screens created by an unknown artist in the seventeenth century, a tangle of wild carnations, wild grasses, and Chinese bellflowers occupies the foreground.
By the twelfth century, a medieval society was beginning to emerge, with the samurai military class taking the reins of power from an incompetent, inward-looking bureaucratic aristocracy in Kyoto. The name “Edo” seems to have first been used around this time, when Chichibu Shigetsugu built a home on a section of tableland at Kojimachi, naming himself after the location. His name change—he was thenceforth called Edo Shigetsugu— marks the first historical reference to the place-name Edo. (Edo meant “door to the cove,” an indicator of how far Tokyo Bay penetrated into the center of the city, its waters lapping up against the shore of the Kojimachi tableland.)
Present-day Tokyo, then part of the eastern provinces, belonged to the Koku domain of Musashino, the koku-fu (provincial capital) based in the present-day city of Fuchu. Stretches of the wild, lonely plain were not always safe for travelers or pilgrims. The thirteenth-century bandit Owada Dogen earned a reputation for waylaying travelers passing through an overgrown valley as they progressed westward toward the mountains. His name has survived in a road in the Shibuya district called Dogenzaka, a slope that now bears little resemblance to the one haunted by the city’s most notorious highwayman.
As these accounts demonstrate, history preserved in names, sufficing for the absence of any material evidence of the past, was to become a characteristic of a city thoroughly fixated on the present.
Hagoita—small wooden paddles used in a New Year’s game called hanetsuki—are usually decorated with the faces of kabuki characters. The game, which is something like badminton, is hardly played any more, but the Hagoita Market continues to be a New Year tradition at the Senso-ji temple—one that dates back about 350 years. The faces of kabuki characters can still be seen in theatrical performances; the art form endures to this day. (Dreamstime © Meaothai)
CHAPTER 1
The Master Plan
Fishing village to citadel – Social structure – First
foreign visitors – Pleasure quarters – Flowers of Edo
The origins of entire dynasties have been predicated on foundation myths, cities on oracular prophesies, the divinations of occult figures, the occurrence and mediation of supra-human incidents. Accordingly, legend claims that the goddess Benten, through the medium of a fish that leapt out of the river, led the feudal lord Ota Dokan to a low hill where he was commanded to erect a fortress in the vicinity of a nondescript fishing village named Edo.
The mound, standing above the outer gardens of today’s Imperial Palace, was easily defensible, commanding the estuaries of a number of local rivers. One of those waterways was the Hibiya inlet, connected to Edo Bay. Boats could anchor at a quay near the foot of the settlement. Under Ota’s supervision, beginning in 1457, the quay was turned into a thriving center for shipping and trade. Fish, rice, tea, copper, iron, and much-coveted herbal medicines from China were offloaded here.
Visiting poets, scribes and members of the literary nobility left short accounts of this first incarnation of the city, but no trace remains of its earth fortifications or structures. Its thatched buildings, compacted earthen embankments, bamboo palisades, ditches, and wells were likely more akin to a rural stockade than a castle. The site reverted to nature and the original fishing families who predated the settlement after Ota Dokan’s murder in 1486 at the command of his own lord, Uesugi Sadamasa, who was jealous of Ota’s success as a military strategist and gifted administrator.
The plot of land rose to unexpected prominence a hundred years later. Its elevation from a dismal fishing village huddled within marshland to the world’s largest city begins with the arrival of the warrior-clan head Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1590. The site of Edo and its eight surrounding provinces were Ieyasu’s reward for masterminding a successful military campaign against the Hojo clan, the principal rivals of the supreme hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had occupied the fiefdom and overseen it from his stronghold at Odawara. Hideyoshi’s largesse concealed a desire to distance Ieyasu from Kyoto and the centers of