page_title: Edo
section_title: Shonin
hierarchical_section_title: Edo / Urbanism / Housing / Shonin
caption_attribution_description: English: Working-class district apartments (Fukagawa Edo Museum)
context_page_description: Edo, also romanized as Jedo, Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of Tokyo.
  Edo, formerly a jōkamachi centered on Edo Castle located in Musashi Province, became the de facto capital of Japan from 1603 as the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. Edo grew to become one of the largest cities in the world under the Tokugawa.
  After the Meiji Restoration in 1868 the Meiji government renamed Edo as Tokyo and relocated the Emperor from the historic capital of Kyoto to the city. The era of Tokugawa rule in Japan from 1603 to 1868 is known eponymously as the Edo period.
context_section_description: In a strict sense of the word, chōnin were only the townspeople who owned their residence, which was actually a minority. The shonin population mainly lived in semi-collective housings called nagaya (長屋, litt. "Long house"), multi-rooms wooden dwellings, organized in enclosed machi (町, "town" or "village"), with communal facilities, such as wells connected to the city's fresh water distribution system, garbage collection area and communal bathrooms. A typical machi was of rectangular shape and could have a population of several hundreds.
  The machi had curfew for the night with closing and guarded gates called kidomon (木戸門) opening on the main street (表通り, omote-dori) in the machi. Two floor buildings and larger shops, reserved to the higher-ranking members of the society, were facing the main street. A machi would typically follow a grid pattern and smaller streets, Shinmichi (新道), were opening on the main street, also with (sometimes) two-floor buildings, shop on the first floor, living quarter on the second floor, for the more well-off residents. Very narrow streets accessible through small gates called roji (路地), would enter deeper inside the machi, where single floor nagayas, the uranagayas (裏長屋, litt. "backstreet long houses") were located. Rentals and smaller rooms for lower ranked shonin were located in those back housings.
  Edo was nicknamed the City of 808 machi (江戸八百八町, Edo happyaku hacchō), depicting the large number and diversity of those communities, but the actual number was closer to 1,700 by the 18th century.
caption: Typical ''nagaya'' housing district in backstreets.
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