Skip to content

Tokyo · 2016

2016 Tokyo 1

A quiet residential street in Tokyo lined with low houses and apartment blocks, with a zebra crossing, parked cars and overhead power lines.
The Tokyo Skytree rises in the hazy distance between apartment buildings along a tree-lined canal. A compact Tokyo hotel room with a desk, TV, laptop, beige chair and a bed. A close-up of a modern Japanese bidet toilet with a control panel of washlet buttons beside a roll of green tissue. A green-roofed temple gate stands at the end of a path, framed by modern skyscrapers in central Tokyo. A grand temple with a dark tiled roof stands on a wooded hill above a paved stone path in Tokyo. Pink cherry blossoms bloom on trees lined along a quiet Tokyo park under a clear blue spring sky. A bronze equestrian statue of a general on horseback stands on a pedestal in a park of bare winter trees. A wide paved path lined with tall leafless trees and low wooden fences winds through a bustling Tokyo park. A grand stone museum building with a dark tiled roof stands behind a reflecting pool dotted with small fountains. Three antique wooden Buddhist guardian statues in armor stand in a dimly lit museum display case. Two circular bronze boxes engraved with landscape scenes rest in a dark museum case. Rows of aged rolled scrolls stored in shallow dark lacquered boxes in a museum case. A museum display of a gold-decorated lacquered box on an ornate stand surrounded by small combs and cylindrical cases. Small bronze figurines of a snail, a rat and other animals are displayed in a row on a lit museum shelf. A long, curved Japanese sword with a visible temper line rests on draped fabric inside a museum display case. A square glazed ceramic plate painted with an ink figure of a robed scholar sits on a stand in a museum case. Two large covered porcelain vases with bird finials and a matching ornamental dish stand in a glass museum display case. A dark lacquered box decorated with gold makie fan and foliage motifs sits beside a matching tray. Black-and-gold lacquered tea containers and small decorated trays sit in a museum display case. Four painted folding fans decorated with gold leaf and figures are arranged on a white museum wall with Japanese labels. A pale silk robe embroidered with floral and fan motifs is draped on a museum stand. A framed black-and-white photograph of sheep resting on a rocky hillside with a dirt path. A framed historic black-and-white photograph showing two large stone elephant statues flanking a grassy tomb path. A framed black-and-white photograph of a historic multi-tiered gate tower on a stone wall hangs in a museum. A calm pond reflects dense evergreen trees beside a small wooden pavilion in a quiet Tokyo park. Two ancient cloth headpieces, one patterned tan and one dark navy, stand side by side on stands inside a museum glass case. A hanging scroll painting depicts a bearded sage in yellow robes seated with a small drum and a lute-like instrument. A round dark wooden ornament with raised gold cloud and scroll patterns hangs on a museum wall. Gold hoop earrings wear red silk ribbons and tiny bell pendants, displayed with plain hooks in a museum case. Two long and slender antique smoking pipes rest side by side on a textile mat inside a museum display case. A long rectangular box covered in ornate openwork carvings and a circular crest sits on a museum shelf. Three short curved daggers in decorated scabbards laid out on a white museum display. A fragmented stone monument with fine carvings displayed beside a panel about death in the Kamakura period. A row of ancient stone steles, some carved with figures and symbols, stands on display in a museum gallery. Four weathered stone steles carved with old inscriptions stand in a row on a museum shelf. A museum case holds a large bronze plaque bearing a chrysanthemum crest surrounded by several round metal discs. Pieces of sheet gold are laid out on a display card next to handwritten Japanese calligraphy in a museum case. This bilingual museum label explains a hollyhock leaf-shaped gold foil unearthed at Honmaru Palace, Edo Castle. Oval Japanese gold coins are displayed in two neat rows against a dark museum panel. Ancient rusted iron swords and pointed spearheads lie flat in a museum case with numbered labels. A pair of metal shoes with a sieved mesh surface is displayed together in a museum case. A large buff-colored clay model with boat-shaped wings and small vessels displayed on a pedestal. A close-up of a katana blade showing its dark steel and wavy temper line against a plain background. A long sword blade is mounted horizontally on a white stand inside a glass museum display case. Several long, green-patinated bronze spearheads and blades are laid out on a white museum display table. A row of reddish-brown earthenware vessels, including tall pedestal stands and a large decorated jar, is displayed in a museum case. A dark museum board presents numbered prehistoric harpoon points, curved fish hooks, and stone tools arranged in rows. Two ancient clay figurines, one owl-shaped and one with goggle-like eyes, stand in a museum case. A large dark ancient bell stands inside a glass display case in the museum. Several ancient bronze bells, including one tall and finely decorated example, are displayed in a glass museum case. A row of bronze spearheads and blades is mounted vertically on a museum panel with number tags. A museum case of prehistoric clay figurines, including oval faces with large eyes and small standing figures. A terracotta Haniwa warrior figure wearing a helmet and armor stands inside a museum glass case. A tall dark bronze ornamental stand with a gilded vessel beside it sits in a museum gallery where visitors walk. A dark bronze stand ringed by carved demon figures and animal ornaments supports an elaborate ritual vessel base. An oil painting in a gilt frame shows two men in traditional clothing resting beside straw bales in a rustic room. A bronze statue of a man in an overcoat raises one arm from a stone pedestal in a park. From an elevated railway platform, a dense cluster of mid-rise commercial buildings stretches across a cloudy city sky. Cars drive along a busy road beneath an elevated railway line, seen from a raised walkway. A busy Tokyo street seen from a rail overpass, with cars, a crosswalk, a cream-colored bus and many pedestrians. Pedestrians cross a busy street beneath colorful tax-free electronics shop signs in Akihabara. A busy daytime pedestrian street in Akihabara, Tokyo, lined with colorful neon and billboard signs. A crowded street in Akihabara lined with tall stores and colorful electronics and anime advertising signs. Tokyo Skytree rises into a grey sky, its antenna crown towering beside a modern glass high-rise on the far left. From a tall observation deck, a dense cityscape with a river and bridges spreads out behind a large window. Looking down from a high observation deck, the dense grid of Tokyo buildings, roads and a rail line spreads out below. From high above, a dense cityscape of mid-rise buildings, streets, and houses stretches toward the horizon in Tokyo. Seen through the observation deck's window frames, a dense grid of city blocks and a stadium lie far below. The dense Tokyo cityscape spreads out below, seen through the observation deck's white columns. An aerial panorama over dense Tokyo shows a broad river crossed by arched bridges and countless buildings fading into haze. A hazy aerial view from the Skytree shows a river winding through dense city blocks. A high aerial view of dense Tokyo rooftops and buildings seen from the Tokyo Skytree observation deck. A museum wall map compares the heights of famous towers, marking Tokyo Skytree at 634 meters.
Journal Notes

General

Tokyo is the capital and the most populous city of Japan, and the first day of this visit was spent between its museums and its tallest tower. The city proper has more than fourteen million inhabitants and the Greater Tokyo Area, which includes parts of six neighbouring prefectures, has about thirty three million, making it the third most populous metropolitan area in the world. It stands at the head of Tokyo Bay in the Kanto region, on the central coast of Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands and home to rather more than a hundred million people.

The scale of the place is matched by its economy. Tokyo accounted for more than twenty per cent of Japan’s output in a recent year, with a nominal product of about 120 trillion yen, which is roughly 62,000 dollars per head of population, and the city is the administrative, financial and cultural centre of the country. It is also a city that is used rather than admired: the metro, whose oldest line is the oldest underground railway in Asia, carries millions of people a day, the streets are clean and quiet, and the whole machine works with an orderliness that visitors notice before anything else.

The arrival was by air, at Haneda, the busier of the two airports serving the metropolis. Haneda began in 1931 as a small field on reclaimed land with a single 300 metre concrete runway, and it now handles up to ninety million passengers a year after its expansion, which makes it one of the busiest airports in Asia. The city that one enters from it is low in the centre and ringed by towers, with the bay on one side and mountains on the horizon.

The day itself was a museum day. It took in a temple, a park, the national museum and finally the observation deck of a tower six hundred and thirty four metres high, from which the whole plain of Tokyo can be seen at once. The season was spring, the flowering trees were out, and the sky was clear enough to make the view from the top worth the queue for the lift.

History

Tokyo is a new name for an old city. Until 1868 it was Edo, which means bay entrance, and it grew from a village in Musashi Province into the largest metropolis in the world. The castle that anchored it was built in 1457 by Ota Dokan, and it was there that Tokugawa Ieyasu established his shogunate in 1603, making Edo the seat of a military government that ruled Japan until 1867. The shogun lived in the castle, the daimyos were required to spend time in the city and to supply materials and money for its construction, and the result was a deliberate policy of urban growth.

That policy worked on a scale that had no parallel in Europe at the time. Edo was rebuilt and extended between 1603 and the 1630s, its population passed a million in the early eighteenth century, and by many estimates it was then the largest city in the world. The administration required to run it was remarkably small: the two offices of the town magistrates had about a hundred and twenty five people each, and the samurai quarters were not their business at all. The city was organised by status and by fire risk rather than by modern municipal government.

In 1868 the shogunate ended, the emperor moved from Kyoto, and Edo became Tokyo, the eastern capital. The twentieth century then did to the city what it did to few others. On 1 September 1923, at two minutes to noon, a megathrust earthquake of magnitude eight struck the Kanto Plain with its epicentre about a hundred kilometres south west of the city. The fires that followed did more damage than the shaking. Over half of Tokyo and nearly all of Yokohama were destroyed, between 105,000 and 140,000 people died, and about two and a half million were left homeless. The reconstruction that followed gave the city much of its modern form.

The Second World War destroyed a large part of it again. Asakusa, where the old temple stands, has fewer buildings older than fifty years than almost any comparable district, precisely because the wartime bombing levelled it, and the temple itself had to be rebuilt. The city that rose afterwards became the manufacturing and financial capital of the post-war boom, and the metro, the expressways and the towers are all products of the last sixty years.

Museums are where this history is kept, and the national museum in Ueno Park is the best of them. It is the oldest national museum in Japan, founded in the 1870s, and it holds the largest collection of art and cultural objects in the country, with an emphasis on ancient and medieval Japanese work and on the Asian art of the Silk Road, including a substantial collection of Greco Buddhist material. Its main building, a stone faced structure with a Japanese roof completed in 1938, stands on land that once belonged to the temple of Kan’ei-ji, and the park around it was laid out as a public park in 1873, following western example in the early years of the Meiji period.

Geology

Tokyo stands on the Kanto Plain, the largest plain in Japan. It covers about 17,000 square kilometres, more than half of the Kanto region, and it extends over Tokyo and six neighbouring prefectures. The plain is a basin of sediment: rivers, above all the Tone, whose drainage area of nearly 17,000 square kilometres is the largest in the country, have filled it with gravel, sand, silt and clay, and the hills that rise out of it stand on older Tertiary strata. The ground falls from about 190 metres at Ome in the west to twenty metres at Yamanote near the centre, and the lowlands of the Arakawa and Sumida rivers beside the bay are pure alluvium.

That is the landscape on which a city of thirty three million people has been built, and it is a landscape in motion. Japan sits where four plates meet, and the Kanto region is at the junction of the Pacific and Philippine Sea plates, which are being subducted beneath the island arc. The great earthquake of 1923 was a megathrust event on that boundary, and the seismic history of the Kanto area is studied as a sequence of large events rather than as isolated disasters. Earthquakes are a design condition in Tokyo, not an exception.

The consequences are visible in the modern city. Buildings are engineered for lateral forces, the metro has evacuation and shut down procedures for earthquakes, and the Tokyo Skytree, the six hundred and thirty four metre broadcasting tower that was the tallest tower in the world when it was completed in 2012, was designed against both wind and earthquake loading, with the fatigue behaviour of its structure studied in detail because a tower of that height accumulates stress cycles from every storm and tremor. It is also the primary television and radio transmission site for the region.

Water and ground level are the second theme. Tokyo is built partly on reclaimed land, including the ground on which Haneda Airport stands, and the pumping of groundwater during the twentieth century lowered the water table under the city and caused the ground to subside, a problem that is now controlled by restrictions on abstraction and by the import of surface water. Land subsidence due to groundwater withdrawal is one of the best documented environmental problems of the plain, and the city’s relation to its own water is the reason.

The bay completes the picture. Tokyo Bay is a shallow, enclosed body of water at the mouth of several rivers, and the city has expanded into it for four hundred years: the shore has been filled and built over until the waterfront of the old maps has disappeared under docks, airports and apartment blocks. The geology of Tokyo is therefore partly natural and partly made, and the parts that are made have to be protected from the same earthquakes and typhoons as the parts that are natural.

Things to See

The first impressions of Tokyo were of order. A street with its traffic moving on the left, the pavements clean, the signs in three scripts, and the Tokyo Skytree visible from a distance, a slim grey needle above the roofs. Then a hotel room, which in Japan is a small lesson in design: a double bed, a narrow desk, and a toilet with a heated seat and a control panel on the wall beside it, which is one of the small technical comforts that visitors remember.

The temple belonged to the older city. It was a Buddhist temple of the kind that Tokyo has kept since the Edo period, with a hall, a pagoda and gates, and with visitors moving through it in the ordinary way of a working religious site. The most famous of these is Senso-ji in Asakusa, the oldest temple in the city, dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, and visited by more than thirty million people a year, which makes it the most visited religious site in the world. Its gate, the Kaminarimon, is almost twelve metres high and more than eleven metres wide, and the lantern that hangs in it is the most recognisable object in the district.

The park was in spring, with a flowering tree standing on its own above the water and the paths busy with people. Ueno Park, which contains both the temple district and the museum, was established in 1873 on land that had belonged to a temple, and it is one of the oldest public parks in the country. In spring the cherry trees open and the park fills with visitors for the few days of the blossom, which is a national institution rather than a tourist attraction.

The museum was the centre of the day and it took hours. Room after room of objects from the Edo period and earlier: carved figures and animal figures, a carved metal box, old scrolls, a sword and its carvings, painted plates, ceramics, fans, ancient silk clothing, pictures, headgear and hats, earrings, smoking pipes, knives, spearheads, pottery, fish hooks, bells, gold fragments, gold coins and a pair of metal shoes for a journey. One panel explained that a hollyhock leaf shaped foil had been excavated at the site of the Honmaru Palace of Edo Castle, which is the sort of object that makes a museum of this kind worth visiting: not the famous masterpiece but the small gold leaf that someone dropped in a shogun’s courtyard four hundred years ago and that an archaeologist found.

The day ended at the tower. The Tokyo Skytree, which reached its full height of six hundred and thirty four metres in 2011 and opened in 2012, is the tallest tower in the world and the third tallest structure of any kind, after two buildings in the Gulf. The lifts take visitors to observation decks, and from them the Kanto Plain opens out in every direction: the grey carpet of the city, the rivers and canals, the bay with its reclaimed islands, and on a clear day the mountains on the horizon. A chart on one of the decks compares the great towers of the world, and on that scale the Tokyo Skytree is in a class of its own.

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tokyo. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo
  2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Edo. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo
  3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tokyo National Museum. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo%20National%20Museum
  4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ueno Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueno%20Park
  5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sensō-ji. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sens%C5%8D-ji
  6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Asakusa. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asakusa
  7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tokyo Skytree. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo%20Skytree
  8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tokyo Bay. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo%20Bay
  9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Kantō Plain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant%C5%8D%20Plain
  10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923%20Great%20Kant%C5%8D%20earthquake
  11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Edo Castle. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo%20Castle
  12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Haneda Airport. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haneda%20Airport
  13. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Honshu. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honshu
  14. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Japanese cuisine. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese%20cuisine
  15. Mandujano-Salazar Y.Y. (2016) Tokyo Tower and Tokyo Skytree: History and Symbolism in Contemporary Japan. Gremium. 3. 11-22. doi.org/10.56039/rgne1a03
  16. KONISHI A., KATSUMURA A., TAMURA Y. (2018) Fatigue Resistant Design of TOKYO SKYTREE. Wind Engineers, JAWE. 43. 11-16. doi.org/10.5359/jawe.43.11
  17. Zaiki M., Mikami T. (2018) Climate Variations in Tokyo Since the Edo Period. International Perspectives in Geography. 35-52. doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7638-1_3
  18. (ohne Angabe) (2022) Aquifer Mechanics and Land Subsidence due to Groundwater. Investigation of Land Subsidence due to Fluid Withdrawal. 55-81. doi.org/10.1061/9780784415702.ch3
  19. Ohnaka M. (1985) A Sequence of Seismic Activity in the Kanto Area Precursory to the 1923 Kanto Earthquake. Earthquake Prediction. 848-862. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-6245-5_7
  20. Kanto Quaternary Research Group (1970) Lower Pleistocene Formation in the Southern Kanto Region. The Quaternary Research (Daiyonki-Kenkyu). 9. 93-100. doi.org/10.4116/jaqua.9.93