ABSTRACT
It goes almost without saying that Japan is among the most highly urbanized societies in the world; by some measures, over 80 percent of its population lives in urban areas. 1 Contemporary Tokyo is often regarded— with hope or with despair— as a harbinger of the world's postindustrial urban future. But at the same time, the roots of Japanese urban life extend far into the past, and the heritage of preindustrial urban life—ways that developed out of the creative tension between warriors and commoners in the cities of the Tokugawa period (seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries) continues to exert strong influences on contemporary Japanese.
