Tim Screech’s lavishly illustrated new book, Tokyo Before Tokyo, states that the area now occupied by the world’s largest megacity was a place of no importance prior to it being selected as the new capital, then known as Edo, in 1603. Archaeology suggests a rather different picture, one in which the layers beneath the modern city have revealed much about the past – both ancient and more recent – of the host to the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics. I contacted colleagues involved in archaeology in Tokyo to take a snapshot of the situation.
It was during the Edo period (1603-1868) that Japan effectively sealed itself off from the outside world to avoid the ravages of Western imperialism that were conspicuously on display in other parts of Asia, most notably India and China. Educated Japanese urbanites of the era cultivated many hobbies, including a passion for antiquities. Knowledge of the outside world came in through a Dutch factory at Deshima in Nagasaki, far to the west on the island of Kyushu. Commodities introduced by annual trading ships included images of famous places from the ancient world, notably the Forum at Rome, allowing it to be depicted by renowned woodblock print artist Utagawa Hiroshige.
The archaeology of the city of Edo has been revealed by extensive excavations over the past century, in particular since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, such has been the pace of development in recent decades, despite the economic stagnation afflicting Japan since the collapse of the ‘bubble’ economy in the 1990s, that there are significant portions of the metropolitan area where all archaeological deposits have now been removed.
