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Tokyo Map - EXPLAINED
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Mar 27, 2025
Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/brighttrip - Enter promo code BRIGHTTRIP for 83% off & 3 extra months for FREE! Watch our Tokyo Guide at https://brighttrip.com/tokyo Leave a comment with any questions you have and we’ll make sure to include it in a future video. Make sure to subscribe to the channel to learn how to travel smarter and be sure to check out our merch: https://fanfiber.com/BrightTrip Michael Thornton's (@dr_maikeru) Paper: https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Reform-Early-Modern-Studies/dp/1793641897 RESOURCES: Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology by Hidenobu Jinnai https://meijiat150dtr.arts.ubc.ca/essays/grunow/ https://wattention.com/wtt32-edo-castle/ https://www.ndl.go.jp/landmarks/e/edo/meguro-shirogane-atari-no-ezu.html https://japanthis.com/rivers-of-edo-tokyo/ Written, edited, and animated by @DanielsimsSteiner
View Video Transcript
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Tokyo can very easily be overwhelming
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It's associated with a handful of superlatives like the most populous city in the world
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home to the busiest train station, or the busiest street crossing. The Tokyo of today is the result of centuries of development and the combination of a bunch of settlements
0:18
So I want to focus in on the foundation of where all this began
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Let's take just a second to get oriented. The city sits right here, on the eastern coast of Japan, next to Tokyo Bay
0:37
Zooming out a bit, you can see it lies along the Pacific Rim, in what's known as the Ring of Fire
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This is the edge of a tectonic plate, and it's along this rim where 80% of the world's seismic activity
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and 75% of the world's volcanic activity occurs, both of which characterize Japan
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Due to the earthquakes and volcanoes, three-fourths of Japan is mountainous. However, the basin that Tokyo sits in is unusually flat
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In my mind, it was inevitable that this spot would be home to a major city
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Another important element of understanding the city is its water. There are four major rivers that run down from the mountains through the city and empty into the bay
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The combination of these and the topography of the city make it very prone to flooding
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This, plus a devastating bombing during World War II, means that it can be hard to find
1:27
old buildings in downtown Tokyo. But what does remain is much of the original street layout
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This is a topographical map of Tokyo. If I zoom in, you can see these unnatural waterways that are part of the current city
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These were built hundreds of years ago to serve as a moat for a castle that stood here
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Edo Castle. Today, the Imperial Palace stands on these grounds, and the surrounding greenery is a
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is a great anchor point when looking at a current map of the city
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The year 1603 marks the beginning of the Edo period, when a new ruler came into power and
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moved the military capital of Japan from Kyoto to Edo, which is modern day Tokyo
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Okay, before I get too deep into these maps of Tokyo, I want to thank Surfshark for sponsoring
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you can use it across all of your devices. So it can be on your iPad, your phone
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and your laptop all while you're traveling. I also actually use Surfshark at home
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for swapping out my physical location for a digital private network. that will show that I'm in Canada or in Portugal
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even though I'm in the United States. This allows me to access content on sites like Netflix
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that isn't available in my region. The office, I'm looking at you
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And if you don't like the service, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link for this is under the like button
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at the top of the description. And we will hop into our video about Tokyo
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In videos I've made of other cities, there's often a clear pattern to the street layout
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In New York, for example, there was the 1811 Commissioner's Plan that laid the city out in the clean grid of streets and avenues
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In San Francisco, I talked about how the streets are named after states in alphabetical order
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But Tokyo is much more complex and irregular than most western cities
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There are portions like this that are pretty close to a grid system
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but other parts are completely irregular. And not only do many of these streets lack a pattern
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but more often than not they also lack a name. As someone mostly familiar with western cities
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this blew my mind. But it doesn't mean there isn't a reason
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and a method behind the streets and their addresses. Let me explain
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Until about 150 years ago Japan had a very clear caste system
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and this social structure had a large influence on where people lived and how each neighborhood
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functioned. If you lived in a lower caste as a commoner, you would live in much more tightly
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packed neighborhoods that resulted in something closer to a grid system, like this area right here
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If you were in the military, you would have lived closer to the shogun and you would have more land
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And if you were a lower level samurai, you would live east of the Shogun
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since east is viewed as the unlucky direction in Feng Shui. And something else becomes a lot more clear
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when we overlay the topographical map You can see that this same neighborhood is in this green area meaning it lower in elevation A lot of the area that sort of light blue was actually still water back in the 16th century
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when Edo was first being developed, and so you really had the castle
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kind of on the edges of Tokyo Bay. This is Michael Thornton, who's an assistant professor of history
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at Northeastern University. Is that an original, that's the original map? Yeah, yeah
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That's awesome. And he helped me understand a little bit of how this works. Tokyo can be divided into the high city and the low city
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On the tops of the hills, these red areas, buildings are less vulnerable to floods and earthquakes
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So this is where people of higher class built. Then as the city grew
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the lower places filled in with commoners. So all these areas over here that are below sea level
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are the poorest districts of Tokyo in 2023. These moats visible on both old maps of Edo
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and current maps of Tokyo are another example of how the city was different from the start
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Rather than a strong city wall, this acted as the main defense
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Having a big grid with open wide avenues is not great for defending the place
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There was never really any wall building. Instead, it's kind of the confusing street system
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and all the moats and this sort of interlocking pattern. Those were used as the defensive mechanisms
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rather than a wall. Portions of it have been covered by roads, but if you know what to look for
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when you're walking around in the area, you can actually find stones from the original moat
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Some of them have plaques that talk a little bit more about it. And I found this YouTube video
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of this guy that walks all over Tokyo and just shows stuff like this. So you should check out his channel
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It's really cool. In fact, Sotoboridori right here means outer moat avenue
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And this neighborhood, Maronozzi, means within the circle. These are some of the many elements of this old Edo
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that still surface in modern day Tokyo. As Edo was built, so was a network of five long roads
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stretching across much of Japan, called Gokaido, that connected the country as it unified
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for the first time in centuries. These five roads all merged right here at Nihonbashi Bridge
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Most of the original roads are gone, along with the original wooden bridge
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but today a bridge by the same name still stands in this place
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and serves as the point that all places in Japan are measured from
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Because of its position on the bay and the moats around the city that could be utilized for transport it really was more a place of commerce than it ever was for defense While Edo was never really attacked by outsiders it didn avoid large destruction
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In 1657, a huge fire burned through most of the city. At the time, the residents were required to live within the moat boundary
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so it was tightly packed and over 100,000 people died. This fire had a huge impact on the city
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The shogun allowed the residents to begin to spread out to the other side of the moat
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beginning an expansion that wouldn't stop for hundreds of more years. Also, just a quick side note, almost every video I've made, a massive city-wide fire has played a role
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Chicago, New York, San Francisco. I was also in Lisbon last summer and a bunch of the buildings have these like fireproof walls that
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are really important there. It just makes me think a lot about fire policies, fire escapes were
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implemented, building materials. Anyway, back to Edo. Unfortunately, this was not the only destruction
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to strike the city. It continued to expand by building but also by incorporating nearby
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settlements, which added to the randomness of the roads. In 1923, a 7.9 earthquake devastatingly
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shook the entire city, and more than just the shaking, the fires that followed once again
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leveled the city. A few decades later, most of the buildings were destroyed again by U.S. bombing
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during World War II. When you look for information about Tokyo, you'll quickly find things about the
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metro system, about World War II, the post-war miracle, and the hosting of the Olympics
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But the small foundation and ancient social structure of this sprawling metropolis still
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pulls weight in where people live in the city and how it's organized
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Thank you guys so much for watching this video. We have an entire guide to Tokyo on brighttrip.com
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where we talk all about how ramen is made, how you can order sushi, how to travel there with kids
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the nightlife, the shopping, public transportation, tons of info over there. We'll see you at
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brighttrip.com. I also left a bunch of links in the description for resources I used for making
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this video that I highly recommend checking out as well as the Surfshark 83% off and three months
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free link. So that's all under the like button and we'll see you in the next video very soon. Peace
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