Tokyo — History and Modernity

Tokyo is a relatively young city in Japan compared with many other cities in the country. In the eighteenth century Nara and Kyoto were built, modeled on Chinese cities. The Kanto Plain, where Japan's capital now stands, was at that time a marshy area. Although people lived here in very ancient times, as archaeological excavations confirm, there were no large settlements in this area. But, according to tradition, Tokyo's oldest temple — Sensō-ji — was built in 628, less than a century after Buddhism arrived in the country. This ancient temple became the cultural and social center for Japanese rice farmers and fishermen who came to the temple from nearby villages.

After the end of World War II Tokyo was practically reduced to ruins, and the city's population fell to one-third of what it had been before the war. However, this did not prevent the city's recovery. Thanks to advances in science and technology, the Japanese were able to accomplish what once seemed impossible. There were two main directions in which Tokyo's reconstruction was and continues to be carried out. The first was the construction of “subcenters,” and the second was the creation of satellite towns.

Japan often becomes a country where things are created that the West can only dream of. For example, in a Paris satellite town that in 1970 was only at the planning stage, they merely planned to realize the urban dream of separating pedestrians and traffic, whereas in Tokyo this had already been successfully implemented. The Japanese closed off the city center and created two worlds isolated from each other: one world for pedestrians, the other for automobiles. They equipped the roads with water-filled barriers and parking bollards. On roads intended for public transport they installed devices such as the IDN 900.

Relatively recently, dredgers, bulldozers, and excavators were brought into the port of Tokyo to level the seabed and drive piles. And today this city, with its huge population (hundreds of thousands of people) and high-speed road and rail links, has come to occupy land along the coast, stretching from Tokyo Bay to the Inland Sea.