INTRODUCTION

The history of urbanism in Japan begins with the building of the capital city of Nara in the early eighth century A.D. Both Nara and its successor Kyoto, built late in the same century, are examples of a phenomenon currently imagined to be peculiar to highly developed technological systems like our own – the ‘instant city.’ They were architectural expressions of the centralization of political and economic power and were created by fiat on the plan of the capital of T'ang China.

By the Tokugawa Period (1615–1868) with which we are here concerned, there were hundreds of castle towns, post towns, shrine and temple towns, marketing centers, and port towns, many of them scattered along the great highways which served to connect the geographical and political fragments making up the country. There were in this period three great cities as well: Edo, capital of the shögun with a population of about one million; Kyoto, capital of the Emperors with a population ranging up to one-half million; and Osaka, commercial and trade center, ‘kitchen of the world,’ with a population between three and four hundred thousand.

Assuming the term ‘preindustrial city’ to have some utility, I suggest it to be a convenient designation for any urban concentration of a preindustrial society, for I find it difficult to believe that there really are any substantial number of ways in which ‘preindustrial cities’ are a homogeneous phenomenon.