Edo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the history of the city now known as Tokyo. For other meanings of Edo or EDO, see EDO.

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.

Panorama of Edo, 1865 or 1866. Photograph by Felice Beato.

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 1,000,000 residents by 1721, one of the largest cities in the world at the time.^{[citation needed]}

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.

The literacy rate of Edo exceeded 70% and was the highest in the world, higher than the rate in London(20%) or Paris(10%).^{[citation needed]}