Tokyo — Capital of Japan

Tokyo was known as Edo for most of its history before becoming Japan's capital, growing from a fishing village into the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate after Tokugawa Ieyasu established his government there in 1603, launching the roughly 250-year Edo period during which the city grew into one of the largest urban centers in the world, even though it was not, at that point, Japan's official capital — that status still formally belonged to Kyoto, home of the emperor.

That arrangement changed in 1868, when Emperor Meiji relocated from Kyoto, which had been the imperial capital for over a thousand years since 794, to Edo, and the city was renamed Tokyo, meaning 'Eastern Capital.' The move was a central part of the Meiji Restoration, the political transformation that ended the shogunate and centralized authority under the emperor as Japan began rapidly modernizing along Western industrial and administrative lines.

Tokyo has been rebuilt twice on a massive scale within the last century: the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake killed well over 100,000 people and destroyed large parts of the city, and Allied firebombing during World War II, particularly the March 1945 raids, devastated much of what had been rebuilt, killing an estimated 100,000 people in a single night in one of the most destructive bombing raids of the war. The postwar reconstruction that followed shaped much of the dense, modern city seen today.

Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, a moment widely regarded in Japan as marking the country's reemergence onto the world stage after wartime defeat and occupation, and it hosted the Olympics again in 2021 (delayed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic), becoming one of a small number of cities to host the Summer Games twice.

Administratively, Tokyo is not a single city government in the way most national capitals are; it is organized as the Tokyo Metropolis, encompassing 23 special wards along with surrounding cities, towns, and villages, a structure that reflects how the city absorbed and merged with the areas around it as it grew from Edo into one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world.

The 23 special wards, each with its own local government roughly comparable to a city, sit at the historic urban core, while the wider Tokyo Metropolis extends further west into the more suburban and mountainous Tama area and includes several inhabited outlying islands in the Pacific, some located hundreds of kilometers south of the main urban center yet still formally part of the Tokyo Metropolis.

Tokyo's rail and subway network, among the busiest and most extensive in the world, developed heavily in the postwar decades to move the enormous daily commuter population in and out of the city center, and hub stations such as Shinjuku handle several million passengers on an average day, a scale of daily transit use unmatched by almost any other city.

The Imperial Palace, home to Japan's reigning emperor, sits on the former site of Edo Castle, the Tokugawa shoguns' seat of power, in the middle of central Tokyo; much of the original castle's grounds and moats survive as parkland and historical remains, giving modern Tokyo a large green, low-density core surrounded by some of the densest commercial districts in the world.

Shibuya Crossing, just outside Shibuya Station in western central Tokyo, is widely cited as one of the busiest pedestrian intersections in the world, with tens of thousands of people estimated to cross during peak periods, and it has become an internationally recognized visual shorthand for the city's density and neon-lit nightlife scene in films and media well beyond Japan.