Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Shogun Iemochi
to Kyoto to explain his conciliatory actions towards the West - the
first visit of a shogun to the imperial capital since 1634. To add to the humiliation,
Iemochi could only muster a mere 3000 retainers, compared with the 300,000 who
had accompanied Ieyasu to Kyoto on the previous occasion.
In 1867 the fifteenth and final shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, formally applied to
the emperor to have imperial power restored. The shogunate was terminated, and
in December of that year the
Imperial Restoration
was formally proclaimed and
15-year-old Mitsuhito acceded to the throne, ushering in a period dubbed Meiji,
or
“enlightened rule”
.
The Meiji era
The first years of
Meiji rule
saw a wave of great changes take place. Far from following
the shogunate in a fall from grace, Edo was cemented as the seat of national power;
in 1869, the young emperor shifted his court from Kyoto to Edo, renaming it Tokyo,
or the “eastern capital”. Determined to modernize, Japan embraced the ideas and
technologies of the West with startling enthusiasm. Brick buildings, electric lights,
trams, trains and then cars all made their first appearance in Tokyo. Within a few
decades the castle lost its outer gates and most of its grounds, canals were filled in or
built over and the commercial focus shifted to Ginza, while Shitamachi's wealthier
merchants decamped for the more desirable residential areas of Yamanote, leaving the
low city to sink into slow decline.
Beneath its modern veneer, however, Tokyo remained largely a fragile city of wood.
When the
Great Kantō Earthquake
struck at noon on September 1, 1923, half of
Tokyo - by then a city of some two million - was destroyed, while a hundred thousand
people lost their lives in the quake itself and in the blazes sparked by thousands of
cooking-fires.
World War II and recovery
By the early 1930s Tokyo had rebuilt itself, but before long the city, like the rest of
Japan, was gearing up for war. The first US bombs fell on Tokyo in April 1942, and, as
the Allied forces drew closer, increasingly frequent raids reached a crescendo in March
1945. During three days of sustained
incendiary bombing
an estimated 100,000 people
died, most of them on the night of March 9. The physical devastation surpassed even
that of the Great Earthquake: Meiji-jingū, Sensō-ji and Edo Castle were all destroyed,
and Shitamachi all but obliterated; from Hibiya it was possible to see clear across the
8km to Shinjuku.
From a prewar population of nearly seven million, Tokyo was reduced to around
three million people in a state of near-starvation. Regeneration was fuelled by an
influx of American dollars and food aid under the
Allied Occupation
led by General
MacArthur. The liveliest sector of the economy during this period was the black
market, first in Yūrakuchō and later in Ueno and Ikebukuro.
In 1950 the
Korean War
broke out, and central Tokyo underwent extensive
redevelopment on the back of a manufacturing boom partly fuelled by the war,
while immigrants flooded in from the provinces to fill the factories. Anti-American
1853
1858
1867
1869
Matthew Perry arrives
with the “Black Ships”
Japan opens up to
foreign trade
Meiji restoration
Edo becomes
imperial capital;
renamed Tokyo
('eastern capital')
