Edo
- This article is about the pre-Meiji history of the city now known as Tokyo. For the Nigerian state or language, see Edo State or Edo language. For the US military contractor see EDO Corporation. Edo is also the name of a brand of chocolate biscuit sticks.
Edo (Japanese: 江戸, literally: bay-door, "estuary", pronounced /edo/), once also spelled Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo. The site of the city, on what is now known as Tokyo Bay, had been settled for several centuries, but first became historically significant with the building of Edo Castle in 1457 by order of Ōta Dōkan.
Kyoto was the site of the Japanese emperor's residence and the capital of Japan until the Tokugawa shogunate was established in 1603 and Edo became its seat of government. From that point Kyoto remained merely the formal capital of the country, while the de facto capital was now Edo, the centre of real political power. Edo consequently rapidly grew from what had been a small, virtually unknown fishing village in 1457 to a metropolis of 680,000 residents by 1700, one of the five largest cities in the world at the time.
Edo was repeatedly devastated by fires, with the Meireki no Taika of 1657 – in which an estimated 100,000 people died – perhaps the most disastrous. During the Edo period there were about one hundred fires, typically started by accident and often quickly escalating to giant proportions, spreading through neighbourhoods of wooden machiya that were heated with charcoal fires. Between 1600 and 1945, Edo/Tokyo was levelled every 25-50 years or so by fire, earthquakes, tsunami, volcanic eruptions, and war.
In 1868, when the Shogunate came to an end, the city was renamed Tokyo, meaning "eastern capital", and the emperor moved his residence to Tokyo, making the city the formal as well as de facto, capital of Japan.
During the Edo period, the Shogunate appointed administrators – machi bugyo – to run the police and – from the time of Tokugawa Yoshimune onward – the commoner fire department (machibikeshi). The machi bugyo heard criminal and civil suits and performed other administrative functions.
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See also
- Tokyo
- Edo period
- History of Tokyo
- iki (one of Japanese aesthetic ideals)
- Edokko (native of Edo)
References
Alternate spelling from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article
External links
- Photograph of declaration "Edo is henceforth called Tokyo" (National Archives of Japan)
Categories
History of Tokyo | Edo period