Tokyo

With more than thirty million people living within a thirty-mile radius of its old geographical center Nihonbashi Bridge, Tokyo is often referred to as the world’s largest urban agglomeration. It is in fact an amalgamation of various administrative entities. The Tokyo prefecture constitutes the political unit under the purview of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) and is home to about thirteen million people. It includes the twenty-three special wards—the contiguous urban core and historically continuous area of settlement from the premodern Edo era until today, which host nine million people. Tokyo’s neighboring prefectures, i.e., Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa (which includes Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city), are administratively separate but indivisible from the urban fabric of this megacity of superlatives. Tokyo’s efficient public transport system brings millions of workers to and from their workplace every day. TMG commands a portfolio and budget that would put it comfortably in the list of G-20 nations. As the undisputed center of Japan, its gravitas transcends the island nation to make it one of Asia’s and in fact the world’s economic and financial centers. Untypically, Tokyo has an urban pattern that has been relatively uniform low rise and high density. Despite its relevance for global urban and Japanese history, few traces of this history are imbued in the cityscape. Its neighborhoods might appear homogenous and to some observers even featureless, but the city’s urbanism is widely held to be successful at negotiating efficiency and livability, while being more equal than its Western peers. It is a city that deserves to be studied more from an urban development angle, too, as its history might hold lessons for other (aspiring) megacities in the developing world. As Japan’s primate city, Tokyo has fared significantly better than other Japanese urban centers during the more recent economic crises, which began with the bursting of the real estate bubble in 1991. In the long term, however, the city’s population will also begin to decline. Some changes to the historical “Tokyo model” are thus inevitable, as a city geared for growth for most of its existence enters the post-growth stage. Liberalization, growing income and thus spatial inequalities, and a more vertical real estate market are but some of the challenges the city is grappling with nowadays. This bibliography focuses on select English language works, including those that have been translated from Japanese. It is organized by topics, starting with some general historical overviews, and then moving on to specific themes, with some overlap and “cross-fertilization” unavoidable and intended.