Kanto (Edo / Tokyo)

The plain that became the country. Kanto is the largest flat expanse in Japan, which in a mountainous archipelago is a decisive advantage, and yet it was for centuries the frontier rather than the centre. Power lay west, in Kyoto and Nara. The east was where the court sent warriors to fight the Emishi, and the warrior class that emerged there eventually took the country from the court. Minamoto no Yoritomo established the first shogunate at Kamakura in 1192, deliberately far from the capital's influence. The decisive move came in 1590, when Tokugawa Ieyasu was transferred to a swampy castle town called Edo. It was meant as a demotion. Ieyasu drained the marshes, diverted rivers and built a city that had probably passed a million people by 1720, making it the largest in the world. The alternate-attendance system compelled every daimyo to keep a residence there and spend half his life travelling to it, which made Edo the country's consumer market and its cultural engine. When the shogunate fell in 1868 the emperor moved from Kyoto to Edo rather than the reverse, and the city was renamed Tokyo, the eastern capital. Two catastrophes rebuilt it: the earthquake and firestorm of 1923, which killed over a hundred thousand people, and the firebombing of March 1945, which killed a comparable number in a single night. Greater Tokyo now holds around a third of Japan's population and a larger share of its corporate headquarters, universities and government. The concentration is itself a national political problem, and every plan to move a ministry elsewhere has failed.

• Existed: 1603 CE – present
• Type: Entity