The ENTIRE History of TOKYO in 11 Minutes

#TheEntireHistoryOfTokyo #tokyohistory #edoperiod Tokyo’s history begins in a mosquito-infested swamp nobody wanted, and ends as the most populous metropolitan area on the planet. Fires, earthquakes, and firebombs flattened this city again and again, and somehow it just kept rebuilding bigger. How does a drained marsh out-survive four centuries of disaster? This documentary traces the complete history of Tokyo, from the fishing village of Edo and Tokugawa Ieyasu’s swamp-draining origin story, through the sankin-kotai hostage system, the Great Fire of Meireki, and Edo’s rise as the largest city on Earth, to Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, the Meiji Restoration, the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the deadliest bombing raid in human history, and the postwar rebuild that produced the 1964 Olympics and today’s hyper-dense megacity. In this video: ▸ Why a shogun’s family forced two hundred and fifty rival lords into permanent commuting ▸ The firefighting method that tore buildings down instead of putting fires out ▸ How human waste turned into one of Edo’s most valuable commodities ▸ Why a historic bridge has been buried under a highway for sixty years Every disaster that hit Tokyo, from the 1657 fire to the 1945 firebombing, should have been the end of the story. Instead, the same families kept rebuilding on the same ash, and the city that grew out of a swamp became the largest metropolitan area on Earth. The next time your train is packed shoulder to shoulder, you’re standing inside the result of four centuries of a city refusing to stay destroyed. Sources: ▸ Edward Seidensticker, Low City High City, 1983 — Edo to the 1923 earthquake ▸ Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising, 1990 — postwar rebuilding to the Olympics ▸ Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan, 1993 — the Tokugawa shogunate system ▸ J. Charles Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake, 2013 — the 1923 disaster ▸ W.G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration, 1972 — the fall of the shogunate #tokyo #japanhistory #edoperiod #historydocumentary #worldhistory #tokugawaieyasu #meijirestoration #japanesehistory