Tokyo

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.

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

No metropolitan region on the planet holds more people than the one built around Tokyo. The 23 special wards that form the historic city core, roughly the area Tokyo prefecture calls its urban heart, held over 14 million residents as of 2023, but the wider built-up region, the Greater Tokyo Area reaching out through Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama and beyond, holds closer to 33 million, a population larger than most countries assembled around one rail network. That network is a large part of the story: Tokyo grew dense rather than sprawling because its commuter rail system, among the busiest in the world, made living an hour or more from the center compatible with working at it.