ABSTRACT
The market place is a phenomenon of the city. It remained like the heterotopias of medieval Japan the place par excellence where people did things differently. As people and products from all over Japan came into Edo, they were stopped and checked at watch-gates. The market place became a Pandora's Box in Edo. It exposed the samurai's dependence on the services of the merchants. Most often the tea ceremony is perceived as a legacy of the court, in particular of the samurai rustic culture, and it was gradually adapted by the merchants. In Edo during Tokugawa, the firebreaks served as a void in a double sense of the term, a void for fighting the flames in the literal sense of the term, and a void in a symbolic sense as an urban sanctuary. Urban society is a realm with its own rules of law, an object domain possessing a naturalness of immanent, self-regulatory mechanisms.
