On the one hand, it should not be surprising that things were different in Japan than in Europe. There is no one model of urban form, and the town square model that we normally associate with Europe is not universal, even in the West.

On the other hand, we do have a lot of information on Edo, in part because it was the Lord’s City (gofunai) and thus a lot was written and saved about it. The Shogun’s government also paid a lot of attention to it, particularly after the Meireki fires of 1657, when the city was almost entirely re-built. In general, there was not a single “central” public space because there was not a single public, or even a single city. Given that the population of the city was divided into two big groups (warriors and chonin) and countless subgroups this is not surprising. There were lots of public spaces though.

First, where was the city? Like most Japanese cities, it grew from a castle-town, and the boundaries were not always clear. Edo was not formally defined until 1791, when the Shogunate defined it as everything within 4 ri (about 10 miles) of the castle walls. There had been a lot of questions about where the city ended from warriors who were not supposed to leave the city without permission, and this finally gave them a formal boundary for this purpose. There were actually different versions of the city. One definition was that it was the area governed by the city magistrates, but that area was growing as the artisans and commoners the magistrates governed spread out. There was the religious Edo defined by the territories of the shrines and temples, which was about the same as the lost children Edo, which was the area in which you could post about a lost child (or an accident victim) at Shibaguchi. The Edo that people exiled from the city were to stay out of was a bit smaller. In 1818 the senior councilors drew two lines on a paper map, one defining the lord’s city and inside that one defining the area under the city magistrates, but even this did not solve things.

While all this focuses on the formal definition of the city, the ability of the government to define space was limited. Firebreaks were a good example of this. After the Meireki fires the government tried to keep the Edobashi district outside the castle as a firebreak. (Not the only one.) Ideally, this would be a place for people fleeing a fire to congregate, although authorities were also supposed to see to it that people did not use this open space to settle “fights and quarrels”. (McClain et al 113). This would seem to be one form of public space (and banning another form) but this was prime commercial land and people began renting out space from the ward bosses for temporary fruit and veg stands, and then shops, and then warehouses. Eventually there were archery stands and other entertainments. These things were all done with official approval, but in practice the government had only limited ability to control space in Edo.

Where were the public spaces then? Markets and shops were all over, and government attempts to keep them to defined areas were not that successful. Temples and shrines were one place the public gathered for all sorts of purposes, and they were the centers of the religious events and festivals that marked public life. The symbolic center of the city (and of Japan) was Nihonbashi, the bridge at the center of the city, which is still where distances in Japan are measured from, and the Nihonbonshi district was as close to “downtown” as Edo had. Anyone…well anyone male with some money could enjoy the pleasures of the floating world, but there was no single public center.

To the extent there was a ritual center it was either Edo castle or the streets, or maybe the temples. Temples and shrines were the sites of religious rituals. The castle was where the Shogun would receive lords coming in for their sankin kotai obligations, or Dutch or Korean missions, but anyone could be entertained by watching them parade through the streets. The castle was a symbol of authority, but it and its rituals were not open to the public, and the castle itself was shown as a blank space on maps, which remained true even in Meiji, when it became the site of the Imperial palace.

Mary Berry points out (pg 179) that the public places of Edo were partly defined by time. The public were the people who watched the parades like the Sanno Gongen Festival of Hie Shrine in June, and the people who bought new year’s decorations at Asakusa Kannon and had the urbane tastes of the true Edokko person. Even if the state had tried to define a single public center it probably would not have worked.

Sources

Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. 1st ed. University of California Press, 2007.

McClain, James L., John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, eds. Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era. Reprint edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Nishiyama, Kazuo. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868. Translated by Gerald Groemer. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Screech, Timon. Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo. London: Reaktion Books, 2020.

Toby, Ronald P. “Carnival of the Aliens. Korean Embassies in Edo-Period Art and Popular Culture.” Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 4 (December 1, 1986): 415–56.

Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan. 1st Edition. University of California Press, 2003.