From Kyoto to Tokyo Shun-ichi J. Watanabe Tokyo University of Science, Japan Tokyo became the de facto capital of Japan by the move of the Emperor Meiji from Kyoto in 1869. Since then, the city has served as almost the only wide window through which the foreign civilization was imported to Japan for more than a century. The function of the central government continued to attract all kinds of activities in administration, economy and culture, making Tokyo the control tower of the nation. In the early years, the central government started to remodel the medieval castle town of Edo into the modern city of Tokyo. This construction scheme has become the prototype of the Japanese ‘city planning.’ The population that was about half a million at the beginning and approached two million figure around the beginning of the 20th century, is now sprawling into the surrounding municipalities and prefectures. The history of the capital Tokyo is the one of the rapidly growing metropolis, of the disorderly development for urbanization and of the planning’s fight against it. The history includes the destruction and reconstruction of ‘planning disaster’ of Urban Improvement, the Great Kanto Earthquake and the bombed damage during the World War II. The story ends with the recent fuss about the removing the Diet function away from Tokyo. [email protected] 1 1 From Kyoto to Tokyo, 1867-1880s1 The Tokugawa shogunate, which had been in power in Japan for 265 years, came to an end in 1867 when political control was transferred to new rulers acting in the name of the young Emperor Meiji. Known as the Meiji Restoration, this marks Japan’s birth as a modern nation. In 1868 the Emperor made an official journey from the imperial capital, Kyoto, to Edo, the city 500 kilometres to the east that had been the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate.2 The Emperor took up residence in Edo Castle, making it the Imperial Palace. There was much protest from the people of Kyoto, so the government decided not to make the change of capital to Tokyo official. However, a strategic decision was made for the Emperor to stay in his Tokyo residence, making Tokyo the de facto capital, and the name of the city was changed to Tokyo, meaning ‘Eastern Capital’. Thus Tokyo, which has never been legally declared as the capital of Japan, became the seat of government at the beginning of the modern age. At the time, Japan was still a developing country whose economy was based on agriculture. Tokyo was located in the middle of the fertile Kanto plains; the central location in the nation was beneficial as well, and the port of Yokohama, base for trade with the Western world, was only 30 kilometres away. The city’s population started expanding in the mid 1600s, reaching over 1 million in the late 1700s, making it the largest city in the world.3 However, the departure of former Tokugawa officials and their retainers after the Meiji Restoration reduced the population to roughly half by the early 1870s. The Meiji government tried to rebuild the castle town of Edo into the modern capital city of Tokyo. Of all of the major world capitals today, Tokyo has the unusual history of being one of the only ones to have been developed as a modern capital city considerably after it had initially become a big city. As a capital city at the centre of Japan’s efforts to modernise and Westernise, Tokyo represented Japan’s most important site for exchange with foreign countries. It became the showcase for such novel modern innovations as gas lamps, railroads, and brick-built districts. National railroad and telegraph systems connected the entire country to Tokyo. Many of the future leaders of the country migrated from the provinces to Tokyo, seeking jobs in the capital’s important sectors, including government, military, business, and education. The city started to grow rapidly as a huge political, economic, and cultural centre. Meiji leaders sensed the power and newness of Western cities and viewed them as symbols of civilization. They wanted to transform Tokyo into a showcase as grand as the Western capitals. Following a fire that destroyed large parts of the Ginza district in the heart of Tokyo, the construction of the Ginza Brick District Project was overseen by the British architect Thomas Waters from 1872 to 1877. Shortly thereafter, the German planners Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Böeckmann were invited to Japan in 1886 to develop a plan for the Government Quarter Project. The image the city was pursuing was the equivalent of Berlin as capital of Prussia, or the Paris envisioned by Baron Haussmann. To the Meiji leaders, the destruction of the traditional built environment was a desirable symbol of modernisation. In contrast, Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace, was well preserved as a vast, one-kilometre square area of land in the midst of the urban core. For the Japanese, symbolism of the imperial system was not an overwhelming built environment, as in other nations, but the carefully secluded void creating a natural sense of solemnity. This rule treats the Imperial Palace as ‘forbidden’ space even to subways, and leaves the rest of Tokyo’s built environment less symbolic but more functional as in ordinary large cities. In 1888, to reconstruct the city as the seat of the Imperial Government, the first planning legislation, known as the Tokyo Urban Area Improvement Act, was enacted.4 2 Illustration 1: Government Quarter Project by Boeckmann, 1886 The target area for reconstruction was Tokyo’s urban core. The Tokyo Urban Area Improvement Commission was formed to discuss the plan, which obtained Cabinet approval and then was implemented by Tokyo Prefecture. The Commission was under the jurisdiction of the Home Ministry, which, in the 75-year period through World War II, had great political influence due to its control of local government, police, urban planning, and building control. 2 The Japanese Planning System Modern Western urban planning, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century, aimed at total control of ever-growing industrial metropolises. Its goals were, first, to control urban structure at the large scale by planned provision of urban infrastructure and, second, to create comfortable urban spaces at the small scale through land use controls and urban design. In terms of urban structure, Meiji leaders wanted to improve infrastructure of the urban core, but did not include the idea of controlling the urban structure of the entire city. In terms of urban space, they succeeded in building limited areas in the urban core in Western style as 3 symbols of civilization, but most of the city was left untouched, remaining a dense sea of wooden residential structures. For a long period thereafter, urban planning in Japan dealt with individual urban facilities and buildings as separate entities through direct provision and indirect regulation. An explanation why they did not have a more expansive vision lies in the very different urban conditions in Japan in contrast to Western Europe and North America. The Western approach to urban planning started with preparations of plans by professional planners and development of legal mechanisms to implement such plans. In contrast, planning did not even exist as a profession in Japan. It was accepted that urban growth was a natural process, and that the aim of planning was to incrementally mitigate the accompanying problems. The scale and speed of urbanisation were great, but sufficient controlling power was not given to planners to combat urbanisation. 3 An Emerging Metropolis, 1880s-1920s After the initial post-Restoration decline, Tokyo’s population began to increase again, passing Edo’s peak by the mid 1880s. By 1900, the population was a little less than 2 million, and the urban area reached a radius of 7 to 8 kilometres from the Imperial Palace. To its west, the urban front expanded beyond the borders of Edo, spilling into other towns and villages. This suburbanization, which began about 50 years later in Japan than in major cities of the West, signified Tokyo’s growth into a metropolis. As the city set out on a course of industrialisation and modernisation, urban growth took place in a regulatory vacuum without any land use controls of modern urban planning. Looking at Tokyo’s urban core at the turn of the century, we find that the pre-existing urban form of the castle town Edo had almost disappeared as a result of reconstruction projects by the Tokyo Urban Area Improvement Commission. It was common to place modern facilities in the urban core, replacing the traditional built environment (except for the castle) instead of creating new precincts outside. Along with the construction of Tokyo Central Station in 1914, there was a modern office district and a new government building district. In 1920, the construction of the National Diet Building started on former Army land about 500 metres south of the royal moat. The Diet’s monumental facade refrained from facing the Imperial Palace but faced Tokyo Station. The location and orientation were exactly as in Böckmann’s Government Quarter proposal some 30 years before. The Diet building marked this spot as the new centre of the capital of the modern nation. If one stood nearby at the main intersection in Hibiya and looked around, to the north-east one could see the newly developed Hibiya office district, to the south-east the traditional Ginza shopping district, to the south-west the fairly well planned Kasumigaseki government quarters, and to the north-west the Imperial Palace. All of the most important areas of the capital were located within a mile.