Resistance continued in the city and in the northern provinces. Though most of the Tokugawa forces scattered through the city surrendered, one band took up positions at Ueno, whence it sent forth patrols as if it were still in charge of the city. The heights above Shitaya, now Ueno Park, were occupied by the great Kan-eiji, one of the Tokugawa mortuary temples, behind which lay the tombs of six shoguns. The holdouts controlled the person of the Kan-eiji abbot, a royal prince, and it may have been for this reason that the victors hesitated to attack.
In mid-May by the lunar calendar, on the Fourth of July by the solar, they finally did attack. From early morning, artillery fire fell upon Ueno from the Hongō rise, across a valley to the west. It was only late in the afternoon that the south defenses were breached, at the “Black Gate,” near the main entrance to the modern Ueno Park, after a fierce battle. Perhaps three hundred people had been killed, twice as many among the defenders as among the attackers. Much of the shelling seems to have fallen short, setting fires. Most of the Kan-eiji was destroyed, and upwards of a thousand houses burned in the regions between Ueno and the artillery emplacements. The abbot fled in disguise, and presently left the city by boat.
If we may leave aside linguistic niceties and say that Edo was now Tokyo and the capital of Japan, it was different from the earlier capitals, Nara and Kyoto. It was already a large city with a proud history. Edo as the shogun’s seat may have been an early instance of a fabricated capital or seat of power, but it had both Chinese and Japanese forebears. Nara and Kyoto had been built upon rural land to become capitals; there had been no urban class on hand to wish that the government had not come. So it had been with Edo when it first became the shogun’s seat, but when it became the emperor’s capital there were the centuries of Edo to look back upon. The proper son of Edo had acquired status by virtue of his nearness to Lord Tokugawa, and when he had the resources with which to pursue good taste, he could congratulate himself that he did it impeccably. Now came these swarms of bumpkins, not at all delicate in their understanding of Edo manners.
Destroyed, my city, by the rustic warrior.
No shadow left of Edo as it was.
This is Tanizaki Junichirō, speaking, much later, for the son of Edo. It is an exaggeration, of course, but many an Edo townsman would have echoed him.
The emperor departed Kyoto in the autumn of 1868. He reached the Shinagawa post station, just south of the city, after a journey of some three weeks, and entered the castle on the morning of November 26. Townsmen turned out in huge numbers, but the reception was reverent rather than boisterous; utter silence prevailed. By way of precaution against the city’s most familiar disaster, businesses requiring fires were ordered to take a holiday. Then the city started coming back to life. Despite its affection for Lord Tokugawa, it was happy to drink a royal cup. Holidays were decreed in December (the merchant class of Edo had allowed itself scarcely any holidays); two thousand five hundred sixty-three casks of royal sake were distributed through the city, and emptied.
The emperor returned to Kyoto early in 1869, after the pacification of the northern provinces. He was back in Tokyo in the spring, at which time his permanent residence may be said to have begun. He did not announce that he was leaving Kyoto permanently, and the old capital went on expecting him back. It was not until 1871 that the last court offices were removed from Kyoto, and most of the court aristocracy settled in Tokyo. Edo castle became what it is today, the royal palace, and Tokyo the political center of the country. Until 1923 there was scarcely a suggestion that matters should be otherwise.
The outer gates to the palace were dismantled by 1872, it having early been decided that the castle ramparts were exaggerated, and that the emperor did not need such ostentatious defenses. Several inner gates, though not the innermost, were released from palace jurisdiction, but not immediately dismantled. The stones from two of the castle guard points were used to build bridges, which the new regime favored, as the old had not.
Initial policy towards the city was cautious, not to say confused. In effect the Edo government was perpetuated, with a different terminology.
The north and south magistrates, both with offices in the flatlands east of the castle, were renamed “courts,” and, as under the Tokugawa, charged with governing the city in alternation.
A “red line” drawn in 1869 defined the city proper. It followed generally the line that had marked the jurisdiction of the Tokugawa magistrates. A few months later the area within the red line was divided into six wards. The expression “Tokyo Prefecture,” meaning the city and larger surrounding jurisdiction, had first been used in 1868. In 1871 the prefecture was divided into eleven wards, the six wards of the inner city remaining as before. In 1878 the six were divided into fifteen, covering an area somewhat smaller than the six inner wards of the city today and the two wards immediately east of the Sumida. There were minor revisions of the city limits from time to time, and in 1920 there was a fairly major one, when a part of the Shinjuku district on the west (not including the station or the most prosperous part of Shinjuku today) was brought into Yotsuya Ward. The fifteen wards remained unchanged, except in these matters of detail, until after the Second World War, and it was only in 1932 that the city limits were expanded to include thirty-five wards, covering generally the eleven wards, or the Tokyo Prefecture, of 1872. The red line of early Meiji takes some curious turns, jogging northwards above Asakusa, for instance, to include the Yoshiwara, and showing in graphic fashion how near the Yoshiwara was, and Asakusa as well, to open paddy land. The Tokyo Prefecture of early Meiji was not as large as the prefecture of today, and the prefecture has never been as large as the old Musashi Province in which Edo was situated. The Tama district, generally the upper valley of the Tama River, which in its lower reaches was and is the boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures, was transferred to Kanagawa Prefecture in 1871. Because it was the chief source of the Tokyo water supply and an important source of building materials as well, there was earnest campaigning by successive governors to have it back. In 1893 it was returned, and so the area of the prefecture was tripled. The Izu Islands had been transferred from Shizuoka Prefecture in 1878 and the Ogasawara or Bonin Islands from the Ministry of the Interior in 1880. The Iwo Islands were added to the Ogasawaras in 1891, and so, with the return of the Tama district two years later, the boundaries of the prefecture were set as they remain today. Remote though they are, the Bonin and Iwo Islands, except when under American jurisdiction, have continued to be a part of Tokyo. It is therefore not completely accurate to say that Okinawa was the only prefecture invaded during the Second World War.
A still remoter region, the Nemuro district of Hokkaido, was for a time in early Meiji a part of Tokyo Prefecture. The economy of the city was still in a precarious state, because it had not yet been favored with the equivalent of the huge Tokugawa bureaucracy, and the hope was that these jurisdictional arrangements would help in relocating the poor.
Tokyo Prefecture was one of three fu, which might be rendered “metropolitan prefecture.” The other two were Osaka and Kyoto. Local autonomy was more closely circumscribed in the three than in other prefectures. They had their first mayors in 1898, almost a decade later than other cities. Osaka and Kyoto have continued to be fu, and to have mayors as well as governors. Tokyo became a to, or “capital district,” during the Second World War, the only one in the land. Today it is the only city, town, or village in the land that does not have a mayor.
On September 30, 1898, the law giving special treatment to the three large cities was repealed, and so October 1 is observed in Tokyo as Citizens’ Day, the anniversary of the day on which it