ABSTRACT
The sudden increase in Japan’s urban population in the century and a half from the 1580s to the mid-1700s may well have had no parallel in world history prior to industrialization. Edo, renamed Tokyo in 1868, was a cluster of fishing villages around a castle in 1590, but, during the eighteenth century, it is readily acknowledged to have been one of the largest, if not the largest, city in the world. Even by 1700, Edo was certainly larger than any European city, including London at 575,000, and rivaled or exceeded in population the largest of the Chinese cities at the time, Peking. But urban growth was not limited to Edo; cities sprang up throughout the country from the late sixteenth century on and both Kyoto and Osaka had populations in the hundreds of thousands. By the late eighteenth century, Japan had about 3 percent of the world’s population, but it is estimated to have had more than 8 percent of the people in the world who lived in cities of more than 10,000. By this standard, about 10 percent of the total population of Japan was urban in 1800. 1
