Tokyo Phoenix, the Rise of Modern Japan

For over sixty years, Tokyo has been the world's largest city. Today, its gigantic metropolitan area is home to more than thirty-six million people. The population, already hyper-dense, is still rising.

Some observers believe that Japan's resolutely global capital city, embracing the avant-garde, embodies the future for our urbanized technological societies. Yet, only a hundred and fifty years ago, Tokyo was still Edo. A sprawl of wooden dwellings with a population of one million.

The seat of power for the shogun ruler and his samurai knights. The city's spectacular expansion accompanied the rise of modern Japan, but seems to have obliterated all memories of the past. Leveled twice in the twentieth century, Tokyo reinvented itself completely each time.

Very few mementos were preserved. Motion pictures were born in the same years as modern Tokyo. These images are the only way to retrace the city's metamorphoses.

Extraordinary footage, both professional and amateur, was recently discovered and restored and colorized for the first time. Today, these documents enable us to reconstruct Tokyo's chaotic history, recalling the impact of its fury and fervor on the city's people. The rare photographs illustrating the era when Edo became Tokyo were taken by Japan's western visitors, who were discovering the country at a pivotal moment in its history.

For over two centuries, Edo Japan had flourished intentionally isolated. Foreign contact was limited to two countries, China and Holland. Although it was ruled by feudal lords, in many ways it was already a pre-industrial society.

Suddenly, in the mid-nineteenth century, the great colonial empires forced Japan to open its seaports to international trade and exchanges. The supporters of Emperor Meiji adopted a new credo. Japan had to be modeled on the western nations to maintain its independence.

By imitation, the country would rapidly acquire the same modern vision, inspiring western domination of the world. In the year of the Emperor's death, the emperor moved his government from Kyoto to Edo, renamed Tokyo, the eastern capital. Tokyo's calling was to both drive and display the development of a modern Japan, capable of confronting the great western nations as a peer.

Thirty years later, the first motion pictures of Tokyo were again made by western visitors. This footage was shot in the year of the Emperor's death by cameramen from Les Films Lumiere. Samurais slung with swords who worried the Edo's first foreign visitors no longer strolled the streets.

The government had revoked their right to carry weapons openly. The development of roads and bridges, one of the first steps in the country's modernization, made it possible to lay track for western vehicles like these streetcars. Here, they are still drawn by horses.

Some years later, the lines would be electrified. Tokyo's fish market, feeding the whole capital, operated from these wharves. The wooden bridge in the background is the Nihonbashi, which literally means Japan Bridge.

It marked the main entrance to the city. Distances by road to every outlying city are still measured from the center of this bridge. Forty years had passed since Japan decided to take a running jump into the modern world.

But in these shots, the policy seems to have had little effect. But this impression is probably due to the focus of the western filmmakers who were especially fascinated by the exoticism of traditional Japan. In fact, many things had already changed.

When Japan admitted western scientists and engineers, it set to work developing a national industry. It modernized its military according to recommendations from French, British, Prussian, and American advisors. And like its models, it pursued a policy of colonial expansion.

In 1895, in the lightning victory, it captured the island of Formosa, currently Taiwan, from China. Ten years later, Japanese troops battled the Russians. Japan became the first Asian country to defeat a European power.

In the aftermath of this victory, Japan established a protectorate in Korea and occupied Liaodong Peninsula and half of Sakhalin Island. Finally, in nineteen fourteen as an ally of the United Kingdom, it had no problem claiming German colonies in China and the Pacific. When World War I was over, Japan participated in peace talks alongside the other four victors, the only non-western nation in the club.

It was truly a revolution, and that was hard to accept for some Europeans. A recently rediscovered reel of film reveals the degree to which amazing transformations in the heart of Tokyo reflected the new ambitions. Shot in the year of the lightning, this movie projects the image of their capital that pleased the Japanese.

Ginza Dori was the first Tokyo boulevard to adopt a western style of architecture. It has played a starring role in spreading foreign cultures in Japan. Orange trolleys, now electrically powered, trundled along the major downtown arteries.

They had supplanted the rickshaw as rapid transit. The fish market is unrecognizable. The docks and wharves have been widened, and three-story warehouses, painted white, have appeared on the waterfront.

Just beyond it, Nyon-Bashi, the old wooden bridge, was replaced in the year of the lightning by a European Renaissance-style stone arch bridge that would be at home in Paris or Rome. The massive modernization effort also spawned a new business district, where office buildings sprang up to house growing corporations. Today, Marunouchi is the heart of Japanese banking.

Back in the year of the lightning, its new red brick facades earned it the nickname, Little London. The most emblematic of these structures is the famed Tokyo train station, completed in the year of the lightning. Ueno Park was a gift from the emperor to the city of Tokyo.

In it stands a statue. Popular affection for it indicates the strong attachment to traditional values that underlies Japan's jump into modernity. The samurai knight Takamori Saigo, at first a devoted supporter of the emperor Meiji, rebelled against the regime when it decided to strip the samurais of their privileges.

The Tokyo of the masses was also evolving. Asakusa was already a thriving shopping area in the Edo era. A new street was created by the urban renovation.

Asakusa Roku. The theater street instantly attracted crowds. It was Tokyo's Broadway.

The city's first permanent movie house opened its doors there in one thousand nine hundred and three Ryunkaku Tower, the cloud-surpassing pavilion, stood proudly on the corner. It symbolized the new Tokyo, open to western ideas. Designed by a Scottish engineer, this building was then the capital's tallest.

It very quickly became the most popular attraction. In the early 1920's whole educational system was overhauled. Modernization was clearly synonymous with westernization.

Vending machines would dispense fruit-flavored drinks for the thirsty right in the streets. Golf had become the fashionable sport. Players could tee off in Shinjuku.

The first aerial footage of Tokyo was shot in nineteen twenty-three Barely fifty-five years after the end of the Edo period, the city had been transformed into a huge modern metropolis. Its population of one million had more than doubled to reach two point two million people. But Tokyo still lagged behind the great western cities of its time.

London was the world's biggest with seven point five million inhabitants. New York was booming with five million people. Paris's population stood at three million.

But Tokyo was growing quickly, catching up with its models when its development was abruptly halted by a terrible disaster. On September first, nineteen twenty-three, Tokyo was devastated by an unusually violent natural catastrophe. The Great Kanto Earthquake.

At eleven fifty-eight a. m. , a quake of a magnitude of seven point nine brought many buildings in the center of the city crashing down, causing the first wave of victims.

A hundred and thirty of the wooden houses of the lower city were ablaze in less than half an hour due to lunchtime cooking fires. High winds from a typhoon that had just hit Tokyo Bay fanned the flames. For the inhabitants trapped in the firestorm, it was utter horror.

In an instant, the sky had disappeared, engulfed in flames. People's kimonos and belongings were catching fire. Many were filled with screams.

People were being trampled by the huge crowds desperately running for safety. was really hell on earth. Hundreds of thousands of Tokyoites were trying to flee by every possible means.

All the fire hydrants had been destroyed. It took two whole days to get the fires under control. Nothing could be done to save the historical center of Tokyo.

It was almost entirely destroyed. The death toll was terrible. In three days and two nights, over a hundred and five thousand lives were wiped out.

Most people were killed by fire. Nearly all of the buildings that symbolized the fifty-year push towards modernization had been leveled. Ginza, showcase of Japan's international stature, was in ruins.

The flames had devoured the waterfront near Nihonbashi Bridge, annihilating the new fish market. Japan is located in an earthquake zone. This has left an indelible mark on the Japanese psyche.

A feeling that everything is only temporary. And that, compared to the forces of nature, human beings are weak and helpless. The Great Kanto earthquake caused damage on such a huge scale that even today, Tokyo still lives in fear.

Scientifically justified of an enormous earthquake that could level the city once more. In one thousand nine hundred twenty-three, one point five million of the city's two point two million inhabitants found themselves homeless. More than five hundred thousand people camped in Ueno Park with little more than the shirts on their backs.

The quiet resourcefulness with which the Tokyoites dealt with this apocalyptic situation amazed Paul Claudel, the French ambassador to Japan. When I was young, I spent days in the immense survivor's camp, and the whole time I didn't hear one complaint. It would be shameful to inconvenience or disturb one's neighbors with sudden movements or cries of grief.

Everyone is in the same boat, and should stay serene together. Hirohito, then the regent due to the illness of his father, Emperor Taisho, came to inspect the site of the disaster. Reviving Tokyo would require a colossal effort.

But the future emperor refused the suggestion to move the capital. The Tokyoites faced another challenge, even harsher than the one they'd tackled fifty years earlier when feudal Japan made its leap into modernity. The army was called upon to re-establish the transportation lines and to help clear the rubble.

But most of the labor was supplied by the people of Tokyo. Over half a million people simply returned to their property and camped there until they could rebuild homes, often identical to the ones they had lost. A song exalting this enterprising spirit became a great hit.

A new era for Japan began when Emperor Taisho's son, Hirohito, ascended to the throne. Only seven years after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the reconstruction was already completed. The new Tokyo emphatically asserted its status as a big, modern, twentieth-century city.

Its streets looked more and more like those of its western models. Some of the structures that have become emblematic of Tokyo had appeared. They are still visible today.

Eitai Bridge was rebuilt in steel in the nineteen twenty-six Kiyosu Bridge was built in the nineteen twenty-eight It is a copy of a bridge in Cologne, Germany. Niyonbashi Market, which had been destroyed by flames, was relocated to Tsukiji, where it became the world's largest fish market. Tokyo's main train station, miraculously preserved, was restored.

In nineteen twenty-five, New York became the world's biggest city. The American model now seemed to prevail in Tokyo. Baseball, imported from the United States, was, and still is, a national sport.

A newly reconstructed Ginza was again serving to showcase Tokyo's modernization. Japanese women looked to liberated, provocative flappers for a new image. Some of them relegated the kimono to the backs of their closets, adopting western dress.

They were nicknamed mogas, an abbreviation for the epithet modern girl, imported into Japanese. But the rapid westernization was accompanied by the development of a hostile, warlike trend within Japanese society. Japanese nationalism, like the European kind, fed upon the economic difficulties that had followed in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the year.

Young officers accusing legislators of corruption called for the expansion of the Japanese Empire. Colonial conquest would help Japan overcome the crisis. The strange new yellow flag being waved by the students gathered in front of the Imperial Palace is that of Manchukuo, an overseas state founded by the expansionist policy.

The year before, Japanese army officers who'd been stationed in southern Manchuria since the war with Russia in the year of the Great Depression had staged a sham attack. It was an excuse for a lightning invasion of China. Three Chinese provinces fell into Japanese hands almost without a battle.

Named Manchukuo, the territory was proclaimed independent. The Japanese installed a pro-Japanese emperor to govern it. But most countries in the world refused to recognize the puppet state.

Life in Tokyo followed its course. As if no one was aware, the country was headed down a new path escalating towards war. In nineteen thirty-six, a modern young student shot a whole series of films about a subject he apparently found fascinating.

All of the actors in the troupe were single women. The Review, created in the year of the Great Depression, became a regular institution. In nineteen thirty-six, of the Great Depression, the show was inspired by Paris Folie.

Like European entertainment from the same period, it distracted Japanese audiences from worries about the crisis and the specter of war. By exalting the lightness and glamour of modern western culture, neon lights still sparkled in Ginza. Advertising the country's enthusiasm for all things western.

Despite the looming shadow of totalitarianism. Pressure from the hawkish elements agitating for a war of conquest against China was growing. This is a propaganda film shot in nineteen thirty-seven in a Tokyo kindergarten.

Wearing paper gas masks, the children played being Japanese soldiers attacking a cardboard fort clearly symbolizing Nanking. Tensions with China were rising. They would soon lead to the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The United Kingdom, France and the United States expressed concern. Others, however, were discovering the country as a potential new ally. This film, Japan's new face, was made to show German audiences the mixture of traditional values and modernism that would make Japan an ideal partner for Nazi Germany.

Here it was screened for the first time. Germany recognized the state of Manchukuo cut diplomatic ties with China. Trains loaded with Japanese soldiers left Tokyo for the Chinese front cheered on by the crowd.

In early August, the Japanese army took Peking and Tianjin. Shanghai fell in November. In December, the Japanese army marched on Nanking where they perpetrated one of the most horrible massacres in modern history.

But a stalemate soon ensued. Despite its military superiority, the Japanese army proved incapable of controlling the immense lands it had conquered. The ashes of the first Japanese soldiers to die on Chinese soil began to return to Tokyo.

The following year, the National Mobilization Law was decreed. Each act in the daily life of a Tokyoite became an extension of the war effort. As attested by this propaganda film.

That year, the inhabitants of Tokyo formed long lines to dispose of their metals. In order to participate in Japan's victory and the prosperity it would bring. A few years later, author and diarist Kafu Nagai noted his thoughts about how the Japanese population as a whole had been swept up in the military madness.

The reason ordinary people are loathe to disobey governmental orders is their fear of reprisal. The Japanese have no idea They simply follow the strongest authority and concentrate on day-to-day survival, without wondering too much. The women covered their kimonos with colorless robes.

A new air defense law imposed blackouts. And the war would deprive the Tokyoites of the events supposed to symbolize their success in the eyes of the world. In nineteen forty, the people of Tokyo were treated to a gigantic military parade instead of the scheduled Olympics.

Officially, the occasion was the two thousand six hundredth anniversary of Japan's founding. The same year, Japan signed the Berlin Pact with the Axis powers. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

From the end of the year to July nineteen fourty-one, Japanese troops gradually encroached on French Indochina. U. S.

President Roosevelt demanded Japan withdraw and slapped an embargo on oil exports to Japan, which had no oil deposits of its own. On the morning of December eighth, nineteen forty one, the people of Tokyo heard how the Imperial General Headquarters had chosen to respond to the American embargo. The Japanese Air Force and Navy had launched a surprise attack on the U.

S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in the Pacific and pushed the United States to engage in World War Two. The decision brutally pushed Tokyo and its inhabitants into total war.

These people participating in the air raid drill filmed at Nihonbashi were all from the neighborhood. Japanese air raid defense doctrine made it mandatory for civilians to engage in firefighting. Air raid shelters had been dug in the sidewalks of Ginza, where Japanese mogas had only recently strutted their western finery.

In a scant six months, the superiority of U. S. military strength became evident to Japan's generals.

But ordinary citizens were kept in the dark about the war's realities. While patriotic rallies were being staged in Tokyo to boost support for the war, Japan weathered a series of painful defeats in the Pacific islands. But despite the belligerent rhetoric, anxiety now clouds everyone's faces.

Due to heavy combat losses, all the country's youth are now pressed into service. Shot in October of nineteen fourty-three, this film is entitled Student Mobilization. The National Stadium had been built just after the Great Kanto Earthquake of the year.

The ceremony remained etched in the memory of the Tokyoites. It was absolutely colorless. There was a dark sky above them, and beneath them, the flooded ground.

That day, both those who were leaving and those who stayed were tormented by the same feeling. That this was really the end. The certainty that none of these students would return, and that we were also doomed at home.

The Americans had recaptured the Pacific islands one by one. Now their bombers were within range of Japan. Starting in November of nineteen fourty-four, air raids on Tokyo became a reality.

The night of March ninth to tenth, nineteen forty-five was one of the most traumatic in the history of Tokyo. In a ring of flames, the first flying fortresses marked the center of the zone to be destroyed. Those that followed traced the outlines and trapped the inhabitants in a grid of fire.

A rain of bombs followed. From beneath the wings of these terrifying birds, thousands of metal cylinders fell. They sprayed the city with a fluid that ignited immediately an early version of napalm.

Koyo Ishikawa, who shot these pictures remember the terror of that night I saw many people die right before my eyes, before they had had the time to cry out, and there was nothing I could do. There were charred bodies piled up in the streets everywhere. That time, the raid was the most deadly of the whole Second World War.

And Tokyo's civilians paid the heaviest toll. In a matter of hours, three hundred and thirty-four B-twenty-nines dropped seventeen hundred tons of incendiary bombs, leveling over half of Tokyo's old city, and killing over a hundred thousand people in a single night. Many of the victims were civilians, who felt compelled to stay in the city to serve as firefighters, rather than flee.

For the second time, a scant twenty-two years after its first destruction, the heart of Tokyo was again reduced to ashes, and its population annihilated. On August sixth, nineteen forty-five, the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On the morning of August ninth, the Soviets began to invade Manchuria.

The same day, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August fifteenth, nineteen forty-five, all over Tokyo, amid the ruins, people listened to the Emperor's announcement over the radio that Japan had surrendered. For Tokyo, a terrible cycle was ending, and its people were overwhelmed by feelings of humiliation and discouragement.

Once again, all would have to be rebuilt. But some of them saw, within the surrender, the hope of a new era, based on different values. With this vision in mind, they acknowledged the defeat.

had long awaited this moment, but had never believed it would come. The military boots which had trampled all beauty, the regime which had ignored all reason, and the militarism which had stifled all freedom, all of that had suddenly disappeared like a nightmare evaporating into thin air. At that moment I thought, my life is beginning.

On August thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific, arrived in Japan to serve as the military governor. Based in Tokyo, in full control, MacArthur was assigned to demilitarize and democratize the country. The United States was now determined to fight communism.

In the context of the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, Japan could be a valuable ally in U. S. strategy and policy.

MacArthur therefore did his utmost to accelerate the country's reconstruction and the redevelopment of its national economy on the capitalist model. But the Japan he discovered was in a state of wretched poverty. In Tokyo, thousands of homeless people were sleeping at the feet of Takamori Saigo in Ueno Park, just as they had after the Kanto earthquake.

Jobs were rare, and the inflation rate was the highest it had ever been in Japanese history. Devoid of resources, Japan still had to accept the return of six point six million Japanese displaced from foreign territories. Shortages were such that famine was feared.

At the same time, in exchange for a promise that the imperial family would never be prosecuted for war crimes, the emperor signed a humanity declaration. On January first, nineteen forty six, as part of his usual greeting to the public, he officially denied he was a living God and gave up his political powers. Barely four months after the surrender, these Tokyoites welcomed this revolution and the new year in their loveliest kimonos.

The Tokyo trials began the same year. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East prosecuted Japan's former leaders for conspiring to start and wage war. These proceedings were the Japanese equivalent of the Nuremberg trials.

They went on for two years. Of the twenty eight defendants charged with war crimes, seven were sentenced to death and hanged. Ex-Prime Minister Hideki Tojo was among them.

The occupation of Japan and close cooperation between U. S. and Japanese authorities would continue for seven years.

The whole time, Ginza and downtown Tokyo adopted Yankee ways. At times, there were some four hundred and sixty thousand American G. I.

s in Japan, two thirds of them stationed between Tokyo and Yokohama. But for years, there was stark contrast between the luxury of the Americans' neighborhoods and the reality of the rest of Tokyo. American authorities imposed draconian austerity measures to restore health to the Japanese economy.

Food rations for the population were insufficient and a parallel economy developed. Tokyoites had to resort to the black market. Every day, trains headed for the countryside were packed with hungry city dwellers in search of a little food.

They bartered for it with a few belongings they had been able to salvage from the rubble, usually clothing and housewares. Amateur films from this period have recently emerged. They present a surprising image of Tokyo's reactions to this situation.

The man who provided this footage agreed to narrate it. The camera captured the relief felt by these families. The dark years of the war were already behind them.

The future, emerging under the guardianship of yesterday's enemies, was vast and unknown. But under these circumstances, it could only be an improvement. In November 1946, the proclamation of the new Japanese constitution was cheered by a crowd of over a hundred thousand people in front of the Imperial Palace.

Pacifism and democracy were the backbone of the document, which introduced freedom of the press and women's suffrage. Largely dictated by the Americans, it would organize life in post-war Japan. In order to encourage the spread of these values, which were totally new to the Japanese, education was subject to special attention.

Curricula and textbooks were revised. The classes in nationalist morale were abolished, replaced by civic education courses. These students were learning the egalitarian ideals of democracy and the pride in being citizens of the only country with pacifism written into its very constitution.

Equipped with these new values, Tokyo's people went to work once more to rebuild their capital city. On April the sixteenth, nineteen fifty-one, General Douglas MacArthur left the country and a crowd of Tokyoites waved goodbye. Five months later, Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the Mutual Security Treaty with the United States.

The enemies of yesteryear had become allies. And the new pacifist Japan would be protected by the American nuclear umbrella. On April twenty-eighth, nineteen fifty-two, Japan's independence was restored.

According to new government directives, the Japanese would henceforth devote all of their energy to the redevelopment and modernization of their economy in an attempt to regain respect within the community of nations. Only ten years after its destruction, Tokyo has absorbed every trace of the terrible trauma. The city is now the beating heart of the country's economic reconstruction.

During the war, the country's youth left for the front lines from Ueno Station. Ten years later, Ueno is the hub where they now converge from everywhere in the country, bringing their determination and eagerness to jobs in the capital. Prats has nicknamed these kids Golden Eggs.

They've all just earned their degrees and arrived by train loads to join the workforce of the city's businesses, fueling economic growth. In nineteen fifty-five, Tokyo's population reaches over eight point five million, making it the world's most populous city. Only three years after the departure of its occupiers, Japan has embarked on a phase of rapid expansion with no parallel in modern history.

Construction has begun on the symbol of this new rise. The Tokyo Tower is some twenty-five feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. It's the tallest building in Tokyo, and a great source of pride.

Ginza has risen from its ashes and is glamorous again. Its western style shops again attract fashionable young ladies for a pleasant stroll. Tokyo is subject to wave after wave of fashion trends, the product of an American monopoly on ideas.

But the new model was adopted with such overpowering speed that an unusual situation has resulted. Japanese youth are adrift. An American documentary made in nineteen sixty explores this phenomenon.

should be noted that this rockabilly quintet, not to mention the audience, speaks practically no English, aping the West, clinging to the East. This is the split personality of young Japan today. Today, Japan's youth, having lost their emperor father symbol, are rebelling against many things Japanese, even their own family, traditionally sacred.

Japan has been called one big broken family. Its youth feel cut off from the past, disillusioned with the present, and have no clear-cut goals for the future. Japan's ongoing dependence on the United States is the source of a persistent uneasiness which bursts out in the streets of Tokyo in demonstrations opposing the renewal of the security treaty signed in nineteen fifty-one.

The violence of the clashes is just as intense as the pressure that maintains Japanese society's apparent conformity. However, the choice of Tokyo to host the nineteen sixty-four Olympic Games is pivotal. The population unanimously rallies behind the event.

These are the first games to be held in Asia. To ensure their success, Tokyo's showcase city launches a vast infrastructure modernization program. The metamorphosis aims at two goals.

To reinforce the country's growth and impress upon the world the image of a peaceful, prosperous Japan at the cutting edge of modernity. Corporations, the state, and local governments invest colossal sums in the numerous projects surrounding the Olympics. The centerpiece is the construction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, the city's elevated highway.

Once again, the city hurls itself into the future without a backward glance. The neighborhood around Neonbashi Bridge, where a few old brick buildings from the nineteen tens survive, is totally renovated. When the Japanese capital stood before the TV cameras of the world, it looked stunning.

It joined the ranks of the most modern cities of the world. The opening ceremonies unfolded beneath blue skies at the National Olympic Stadium, the very same building where on a gloomy day in nineteen forty-three, a massive cohort of young men was sent off to fight a doomed war. Writer Senoko Sugimoto attended these two events, separated by only twenty years.

Immersed in the excitement of the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games, I felt troubled and oppressed by what had been engendered by passing time. Again, young people were parading. The Japanese flag and national anthem were the same, but the meaning was so very different.

Standing there in the downpour in the year of the disaster, how could I have ever dared to dream that one day, in the same stadium, I would watch young people from the ninety-four countries in the world rejoice together. This Olympiad attracted some six hundred million viewers. Eighty percent of Japanese households were tuned to the games, ratings which have never been reached since.

They reflect the enormous symbolic impact of the event for the Japanese people. Between nineteen fifty-four and nineteen seventy-three, the country went through a dazzling economic growth spurt unparalleled in world history. The spectacular boom was stimulated by two factors, massive public investment and gigantic orders from the United States military mired in the Vietnam War.

It led to a new wave of disruption in the lives of Tokyoites. They saw the city's first skyscrapers rise. In two decades, Japan's rural population plummeted as salarymen flocked to the city.

To provide housing for all these newcomers, satellite cities rose from the ground on Tokyo's periphery. In thirty years, they grew by almost twenty million inhabitants. The tide of commuters traveling to central Tokyo every morning, riding home every night to the suburbs, required exponential growth in the rail transport system.

Today, Tokyo's public transportation network is by far the world's largest. Frenzied consumerism, which stimulated economic growth, became a patriotic attitude. The Japanese forged an expression, Kaimono Minzoku, the shopping civilization, to express their pride in their fervor for spending, which contributed to the country's economic prosperity.

Fashion trends acquired enormous importance and changed at a rapid pace. But the political choices that accompanied this vision of modernity aroused hostility in certain quarters. The Japanese student rebellions lasted longer and were repressed more fiercely than in the West.

The movement ended in the heart of the capital in the year of the year. When police stormed Yasuda Auditorium at the University of Tokyo, which had been occupied for a year by the far left. These were the last pockets of resistance to the consensus in Japanese society.

From then on, it appeared to be only focused on economic success. The oil crisis in nineteen seventy-three crippled Japan, which had always lacked energy resources. In Tokyo, the fear that consumer goods would be in short supply led to a rush on supermarkets.

The country reacted by developing energy-efficient cars and miniaturizing their industrial products. It also undertook a vast atomic energy generation program. To supply Tokyo with light and power, the second reactor at Fukushima Daiichi went online in 1974.

Japan's rise reached its apex in the nineteen eighties Known as the period of the economic bubble. The automobile and electronics industries were generating astronomical profits, increased exponentially by investment in real estate and finance. In the year of the year, the Tokyo Stock Exchange became the world's largest.

The price of office space in Ginza was the highest on the planet. The following year, Japan's GDP was second only to that of the US. Tokyo City Hall was moved from the Marunouchi neighborhood to Shinjuku in a new building designed by Kenzo Tange.

The country had reached its goal and Tokyo had fulfilled its mission, finally surpassing its European and American models as a modern megalopolis and thrilling Westerners with its futuristic globalism. Nineteen ninety-one was the year the bubble burst. Japan rediscovered economic recession accompanied by rising unemployment.

It would have to confront the problems of a great modern nation in a globalized world. More than ever, space was at a premium. The city continued to grow.

Odaiba, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay dating from the nineteenth century, was re-landscaped. Parks inspired by an American model. And new skyscrapers rose to dizzying heights amid the towers of Marunouchi.

But one by one, values and promises that were the bedrock for the rise of modern post-war Japan were undermined by dramatic events. In nineteen ninety-five, twelve people died and five thousand five hundred were injured in a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It was perpetrated by well-educated Japanese.

Suddenly, the myth of the country's domestic harmony and security was shattered. During the winter holidays in two thousand eight, the first post-war soup kitchens appeared, giving free meals and shelter to the homeless as well as support for the jobless residents of Tokyo. Since the adoption of democracy, citizens had thought of themselves as members of one vast egalitarian middle class.

Suddenly, the drastic inequalities of neoliberalism hit home. Finally, the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster aroused sharp doubts in the population. Could they still trust the authorities and the whole technological development model?

Regardless of the outcome of the disaster we are living through, and with all the respect I owe to the human endeavor to limit the damage, its significance is unmistakable. Japan is embarking on a new phase of its history. For the first time since the nineteen seventies, demonstrations were staged in Tokyo.

Crowds marched to protest the government decision to reopen Japan's nuclear power plants. Another issue was the government's attempt to amend article nine of the Japanese constitution of nineteen forty-five, by which pacifism is a fundamental value and the pride of all citizens. In two thousand twelve, the Tokyo Skytree, the second tallest tower in the world, was inaugurated.

And in two thousand thirteen, Tokyo was chosen to host the twenty twenty games. But the popular mood is much less enthusiastic than it was in nineteen sixty-four. Tokyo has risen from annihilation twice, absorbing the influence of all of its models to give birth to a unique form of modernism.

But today, some of its citizens question the wisdom of the constant rush into the future. The whole country must confront the problem of an aging population. Ideas that had been set aside for over a century for the sake of a collective effort have again become central preoccupations.

The relationship to nature. The quality of life. Individual fulfillment.

Harmony. Answers to these questions cannot be derived from any western model. And Tokyo, born of Japan's leap into the modern world, is now wondering how to define being modern in the world of tomorrow.