In September 1923, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck the Tokyo area triggering thousands of aftershocks, raging fires, and the massacre of resident Koreans by Japanese citizens. What came to be known as the Great Kanto earthquake devastated the capital, ravaging the low city with particular ferocity. As Tokyoites rebuilt their city and their daily lives, changes that had been stirring for the past couple of decades accelerated. The many residents who moved out of the low city helped shift the capital’s center of gravity westward into Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Suginami wards and the suburbs beyond. The white-collar, middle-class suburban commuter had an increasingly recognizable pattern of living. An urban culture of consumption and leisure flourished, from the department store to the café. And the “modern girl” appeared in Tokyo as she did in cities around the world, embodying the promises and threats of shifting roles for women, pleasures and perils of consumerism, and allures and dangers of cosmopolitan entertainment. The urban culture of the post-earthquake years persisted into the 1930s as the nation edged closer to fascism and deepened its commitment to war.

In the early 2000s, the idea of Japan as culturally “cool” captured imaginations. Propelled by a government interested in marketing and selling Japan, products from video games to anime and manga were repackaged as embodying cultural cool. And global audiences were reminded that what they enjoyed consuming, from sushi to Pokémon, were of Japanese origin. The capital of Tokyo, now virtually synonymous with the nation as a whole, was to epitomize this “cool Japan” with its technological sophistication, sleek aesthetics, and cultural creativity as host of the 2020 Olympic Games. Despite disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic, what the games reflected vividly was how the Tokyo metropolitan region, tracing a general trend that dated back centuries, had grown almost inexorably in size and in political, economic, and cultural gravity. Not just in historical patterns but in so many ways – from a city center that remains inviolate to the spiral that radiates outward, from the low-rise wooden buildings in the low city to the names of neighborhoods – the past remains deeply woven into the richly textured pastiche of contemporary Tokyo.