Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo

Japan had one of the most highly urbanised societies in the early modern world, and for parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is thought to have possessed, in Edo, the world's biggest city. Osaka and Kyoto, although only half of Edo's size, had populations of about half a million each. Japan's ability to develop its own brand of modernity has often been attributed in part to the size and sophistication of its cities, which have scarcely stopped growing, even today. Tokyo, the successor city to Edo, has become the centre of the largest conurbation in the world. Concentrating on Kyoto and Edo-Tokyo, the contributors to this volume weave together the links between past and future, memory and vision, symbol and structure, between marginality and power, and between Japan's two great capital cities. Architects and geographers, planners and cultural historians, they bring to their depiction of Japanese urban history a variety of different insights. The chapters cover a wide span of Japanese history but focus on the last four centuries. They trace the growth of Kyoto's official prostitution district in the 17th century, compare different illustrative and cartographic representations of the Tokaido highway between Edo and Kyoto, and they examine ideas and dissect plans for urban development in the last century or so. This is one of only a small number of books in English on Japanese urban history. As such, it will be of interest not only to students of Japan but also to East Asianists and urban historians more generally.Fieve, Nicholas is the author of 'Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo' with ISBN 9780700714094 and ISBN 070071409X.