A Village Renamed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Tokyo did not become a capital by growing into the role gradually. Edo was a minor fishing settlement until Tokugawa Ieyasu made it his base in 1603, after which it grew explosively as the seat of the shogunate, passing a million residents by the eighteenth century while the emperor and his court remained hundreds of kilometers away in Kyoto, the formal capital in name only. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 finally matched the name to the power: an imperial edict of 3 September that year renamed Edo as Tokyo, Eastern Capital, and the young Emperor Meiji relocated there from Kyoto soon after. The rename recognized what had already been true in practice for two and a half centuries.