History
Tokyo has only been Japan’s capital since 1868 — younger, in that job, than the United States is as a country. For over a thousand years before that it was a regional castle town called Edo, important but not the seat of imperial power; when the shogunate that ran the country from Edo Castle collapsed and the emperor moved from Kyoto, the city was renamed Tokyo (“Eastern Capital”) and grew, in roughly 150 years, into the largest metropolitan area on Earth.
Tokyo and the wider world
Tokyo’s most consequential brush with the West happened just offshore: in 1853, US Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” anchored near Uraga, at the mouth of Tokyo Bay, and effectively forced the end of Japan’s 220-year policy of closed borders. Fifteen years later the Meiji Restoration followed, and the new government spent the next few decades deliberately importing Western institutions — universities, a constitution, a rail network — into the newly renamed capital.
The 20th century brought heavier contact still. Tokyo was firebombed extensively in 1945, then served as the headquarters of the Allied occupation (1945-1952) under General Douglas MacArthur, based in what’s now the Dai-Ichi Life building facing the Imperial Palace. Less than two decades later, the 1964 Summer Olympics — the first held in Asia — were staged partly as a statement that the postwar rebuild was complete; the 2020 Games (held in 2021, delayed by the pandemic) made Tokyo the first city to host the Summer Olympics twice outside Europe and North America.
Neighbors: Tokyo, Osaka, and everywhere else
Tokyo and Osaka anchor Japan’s classic east-west rivalry — Tokyo cast as buttoned-up and status-conscious, Osaka as loud and funny — but Tokyo’s more practical relationship is with the prefectures physically fused to it: Kanagawa (Yokohama), Saitama, and Chiba together form the Greater Tokyo Area, commonly cited as the world’s most populous metropolitan region at somewhere around 37-38 million people, depending on where the boundary is drawn.
Getting there and getting around
Narita and Haneda are Tokyo’s two international airports (Haneda is considerably closer to central Tokyo); the shinkansen network radiates out from Tokyo Station in every direction. Within the city, the JR Yamanote loop line and an extensive subway network make a car genuinely unnecessary — a rarity for a city this size.
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