Born in Japan

Tokyo time machine: the city through the ages

Today’s Tokyo has looked completely different in every era: a small place in Musashi province, a castle town of a million, an imperial capital, a burned-out city, and a global metropolis. Travel through it era by era.

Before Edo

Edo was part of Toshima district in Musashi province. From the late Heian period the Edo clan, a branch of the Chichibu Taira, lived here; Edo Tarō Shigenaga appears in the chronicle Azuma Kagami in 1180. In 1457 Ōta Dōkan built Edo Castle (some dictionaries date the start to 1456).

The Edo period: a city of a million

Tokugawa Ieyasu entered Edo in 1590 and founded the shogunate in 1603. The Great Fire of Meireki in 1657 burned most of the city; tradition puts the dead at "over 100,000". By the early 18th century Edo is estimated to have had around a million people including samurai (one dictionary gives 350,000 townspeople in 1695 and 500,000 in 1721).

Meiji: Edo becomes Tokyo

On the 17th day of the 7th month of 1868 an imperial rescript declared that Edo would be called Tokyo, and later that year the emperor arrived and Edo Castle was renamed Tokyo Castle. Japan’s first railway, between Shinbashi and Yokohama, opened in 1872, and Tokyo City, with 15 wards, was created on May 1, 1889.

Earthquake and Greater Tokyo

The Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923 (magnitude 7.9) left about 105,000 people dead or missing, about 90,000 of them killed in fires. Tokyo City grew to 35 wards in 1932, and on July 1, 1943 Tokyo Prefecture and Tokyo City merged into today’s Tokyo Metropolis.

War and recovery

In the air raid before dawn on March 10, 1945, sources put the dead at between about 84,000 and about 100,000; Tokyo marks March 10 as its Peace Day. The population fell to about 3.49 million in 1945 (a November survey) and recovered to about 6.28 million by 1950. The Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened on October 1, 1964, and on October 10 Asia’s first Olympic Games began.

Heisei: from bubble to Skytree

In 1987 land prices in the Tokyo area rose more than 60% in a year, before the bubble burst. The Metropolitan Government moved from Marunouchi to Nishi-Shinjuku on April 1, 1991. The subway sarin attack of March 20, 1995 killed 13 people and harmed more than 5,800. On March 11, 2011 the greater Tokyo area recorded shaking of up to upper 5 on the Japanese scale, and about 5.15 million people could not get home. Tokyo Skytree, 634 m tall, opened on May 22, 2012.

Reiwa: the postponed Games

Postponed a year by the pandemic, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were held from July 23 to August 8, 2021, and the Paralympics from August 24 to September 5. Tokyo’s population was an estimated 14,296,683 on September 1, 2026.

Sources: National Archives of Japan; Tokyo Metropolitan Archives; Tokyo Metropolitan Government; Cabinet Office White Paper on Disaster Management; MLIT; Public Security Intelligence Agency; JOC; Tokyo Skytree; Nipponica, Sekai Daihyakka Jiten, Yamakawa and other dictionaries via Kotobank.

Now be born in Tokyo. Born in Japan is a free life simulator: be born in a year between 1947 and 2010 and live through the events of the Showa, Heisei and Reiwa eras at the age you were.

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