Japan: Century 21 - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 354

Edo was founded in the fifteenth century when a mi-
nor feudal lord built a castle on a bluff near the sea. With
a natural harbor, hills that could be fortified, and the
Kanto Plain behind it for expansion, Edo had an excel-
lent geographic situation.
T Tokyo got its real start when the T Tokugawa shogun
Ieyasu decided to make Edo his capital in the sixteenth
century . He and his descendants designed a vast area of
palaces, parks, and moats in the heart of the city . This
grand plan incorporated an imperial enclosure for the
emperor. Reclamation of land from the sea set the pattern
of development for many Japanese cities that faced a
shortage of level land for expansion and needed good
port facilities. By the mid-eighteenth century , T Tokyo was
one of the largest cities in the world.
Edo' s initial growth was based on its function as a
political center tied to other places by a network of roads.
The rivalry between T Tokyo as a cultural and political
center and Osaka as a business center lingers to this day .
With the restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1868, the
royal court was transferred from Kyoto to Edo, which
was renamed “T “Tokyo,” meaning “Eastern Capital.” With
its new political functions and the rapid industrialization
and modernization programs undertaken from the 1870s
onward, the city experienced profound growth into the
twenty-first century .

both flanks of the Inland Sea on Shikoku and Honshu,
through Nagoya to the T Tokyo region (Figure 12-11). The
core region, especially the southern coast of Honshu,
contains strings of industrial cities such as Hiroshima,
which has recovered from the devastation created by the
atomic bomb dropped on it at the end of World War II.
The T Tokaido megalopolis, with 45 percent of the Japan-
ese population, is contained within the core area.
Japan has a classic core-periphery imbalance—
the “developed” capital region focused on T Tokyo, and the
“less-developed” (in a relative sense) regions elsewhere.
Since the 1970s, migration and growth have been in-
creasingly toward T Tokyo at the expense of other places, a
phenomenon called unipolar concentration . As the city
continues to expand, it drains both capital and people
from other areas, many of which are in a state of stagna-
tion. The Osaka region, for example, has not seen the
growth of many industries to replace the smokestack
ones of steel and shipbuilding. In addition, Osaka busi-
nesses continue to relocate to T Tokyo. This process stimu-
lates out-migration and lowers personal consumption.
T To be in the mainstream of modern Japan is to live and
work in or near T Tokyo.

TECHNO-ARCHIPELAGO
T Today, , the Capital T Tokyo Metropolitan Area (CTMA)
houses 31 million people. CTMA ' s phenomenal growth
has paralleled Japan' s integration in the global economy .
Its geographical location between New Y ork and London
is perfectly suited to the online, global, 24-hour, interna-
tional telecommunication and financial transaction sys-
tem. As a result, T Tokyo was expected to provide an array
of businesses and services not directly related to the do-
mestic economy . Other sectors of the economy increas-
ingly demanded specialized services in order to maintain
their competitive edge.
The crucial role of research and development was
soon recognized. Kansai Science City began to take
shape in the 1980s. Kansai T Techno-Research Complex
includes five cities and three towns in the Kyoto-Osaka-
Nara prefectures and is an integrated, multinodal devel-
opment. This structural format models plans for a new
urban Japan intended to possess a multicentered regional
and urban system founded on advanced information
technology . The system was to reorganize from an assem-
blage of hierarchical structures to a unicentered, func-
tional network with CTMA as the central node.
The technopolis was integral to the master plan that
conceived a vast network of science cities across the

RAPID URBANIZATION
Despite more than a century of industrialization,
Japan did not reach the 50 percent urban mark until
after World War II. Between 1950 and 1970, urban
population increased to 72 percent, a figure that took
the United States many decades to achieve. Since
1970, the proportion of people living in cities has
risen more slowly , reaching 78 percent in 2003 and 86
percent in 2010. As the urban population grew dra-
matically , so did the number and size of cities. While
small towns and villages (fewer than 10,000 people)
declined sharply , medium and large cities expanded
rapidly both in population numbers and spatial ex-
tent. This process reflected the country' s phenomenal
economic growth after World War II.

THE CORE REGION
A distinctive feature of Japan' is urban pattern is the con-
centration of cities in a relatively small area. Almost all of
the major cities are found in the core region extending
from Nagasaki and Fukuoka in northern Kyushu, along