page_title: Tokyo
section_title: Pre-1869 (Edo period)
hierarchical_section_title: Tokyo / History / Pre-1869 (Edo period)
caption_attribution_description: English: Kidai Shoran (Excellent View of Our Prosperous Age [in Edo]), Anonymous Japanese handscroll c. 1805, Museum of Asian Art (Berlin). It depicts Edo Nihonbashi in the second year of culture (1805). The author is unknown. A long picture scroll of 43.7 cm in length and 1232.2 cm in width, the wholesale street connected to Nihonbashi Dori and the people who pass through it are drawn in detail. Discovered in Germany in 1999, it has gained attention as a valuable historical material for understanding the culture of Edo during the Bunka Bunsei period. The paintings are still owned by the Museum of Oriental Art, Berlin and now the National Museum of Asian Art, Berlin. 日本語: 『熈代勝覧』（きだいしょうらん）は、文化2年（1805年）の江戸日本橋を描いた絵巻。作者は不明。縦43.7cm、横1232.2cmの長大な絵巻で、 日本橋通に連なる問屋街とそれを行き交う人物が克明に描かれています。 1999年にドイツで発見され、文化文政期の江戸の文化を知る上で貴重な史料として注目されました。 絵画は現在も旧ベルリン東洋美術館、現ベルリン国立アジア美術館がこれを所蔵しています。
context_page_description: Tokyo, officially Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital and most populous prefecture of Japan. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central Pacific coast of Japan's main island, Honshu. Tokyo is the political and economic center of the country, as well as the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the national government. In 2019, the prefecture had an estimated population of 13,929,280. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.393 million residents as of 2020.
  Originally a fishing village named Edo, the city became a prominent political center in 1603, when it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the mid-18th century, Edo was one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population numbering more than one million. Following the end of the shogunate in 1868, the imperial capital in Kyoto was moved to the city, which was renamed Tokyo. Tokyo was devastated by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, and again by Allied bombing raids during World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, the city underwent rapid reconstruction and expansion, going on to lead Japan's post-war economic recovery.
context_section_description: Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo, in what was formerly part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified by the Edo clan, in the late twelfth century. In 1457, Ōta Dōkan built Edo Castle. In 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu was transferred from Mikawa Province (his lifelong base) to Kantō region. When he became shōgun in 1603, Edo became the center of his ruling. During the subsequent Edo period, Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world with a population topping one million by the 18th century. But Edo was Tokugawa's home and was not capital of Japan. (That was caused by the Meiji Restoration in 1868.) The Emperor himself lived in Kyoto from 794 to 1868 as capital of Japan. During the Edo era, the city enjoyed a prolonged period of peace known as the Pax Tokugawa, and in the presence of such peace, Edo adopted a stringent policy of seclusion, which helped to perpetuate the lack of any serious military threat to the city. The absence of war-inflicted devastation allowed Edo to devote the majority of its resources to rebuilding in the wake of the consistent fires, earthquakes, and other devastating natural disasters that plagued the city. However, this prolonged period of seclusion came to an end with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Commodore Perry forced the opening of the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, leading to an increase in the demand for new foreign goods and subsequently a severe rise in inflation. Social unrest mounted in the wake of these higher prices and culminated in widespread rebellions and demonstrations, especially in the form of the "smashing" of rice establishments. Meanwhile, supporters of the Meiji Emperor leveraged the disruption that these widespread rebellious demonstrations were causing to further consolidate power by overthrowing the last Tokugawa shōgun, Yoshinobu, in 1867. After 265 years, the Pax Tokugawa came to an end.
caption: Kidai Shōran (熈代勝覧), 1805. It illustrates scenes from the Edo period taking place along the Nihonbashi main street in Tokyo.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "9750", "Image ImageLength": "375", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:08:14 14:50:45", "Image ExifOffset": "264", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "402", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "982", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "9750", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "375"}