History - People - Living in the city - Economy - Urban regeneration - Management - Transport - Culture, leisure and tourism - Environment - Future of Tokyo - Megacities.

This indispensable one-volume narrative examines the history, culture, environment, economy, politics, future, and more of the city of Tokyo, Japan's political and cultural capital. Tokyo has endured and moved beyond horrible disasters in the 20th century, first an earthquake in 1923 and later the events that unfolded during World War II, to grow into one of the most populated cities in the world. This volume examines Tokyo's history, politics, culture, and more. Narrative chapters cover a wide breadth of topics, including Tokyo's location and geography, peoples, history, politics, economy, environmental issues and sustainability initiatives, local crime and violence, security issues, natural hazards and emergency management, culture and lifestyle, pop culture, and the future. Inset boxes entitled "Life in the City" include interviews with those who have lived in Tokyo as well as those who have traveled to the city, allowing readers to get a better idea of what daily life is like in this global megacity. A chronology, sidebars, and bibliography complete the text. The perfect one-stop resource for high school and undergraduate students, this volume is also suited to general readers interested in learning more about Tokyo and its role as a global city.

“An astute account of [Tokyo’s] commuter train network . . . and an intellectually stimulating invitation to rethink the interaction between humans and machines.” —Japan Forum With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine, Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities. An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population. “Not a ‘rage against the machine’ but an urge to find new ways of coexisting with technology.” —Contemporary Japan “An extraordinary study.” —Ethnos “A fascinating in-depth account of the innovations, inventions, sacrifices, and creativity required to ensure Tokyo’s millions of commuters keep rolling. It also provides much food for thought as our transportation systems become increasingly reliant on automated technology.” —Pacific Affairs

Although Japan and the United States are the world's leading economies, there are significant differences in the ways their wealth is translated into living standards. A careful comparison of housing markets illustrates not only how living standards in the two countries differ, but also reveals much about saving patterns and how they affect wealth accumulation. In this volume, ten essays discuss the evolution of housing prices, housing markets and personal savings, housing finance, commuting, and the impact of public policy on housing markets. The studies reveal surprising differences in housing investment in the two countries. For example, because down payments in Japan are much higher than in the United States, Japanese tend to delay home purchases relative to their American counterparts. In the United States, the advent of home equity credit may have reduced private saving overall. This book is the first comparison of housing markets in Japan and the United States, and its findings illuminate the effects of housing markets on productivity growth, business investment, and trade.

The DK Eyewitness Tokyo Travel Guide will lead you straight to the best attractions the world’s largest metropolis has to offer. From the looming skyscrapers, neon-bathed streets and flashing video screens of the labyrinthine Shinjuku district to the traditional shrine complex of Meiji Jingu, this guide provides all the insider tips every visitor needs, with comprehensive listings of the best hotels, restaurants, shops and nightlife for all budgets. It’s fully illustrated and covers all the major areas of the city, plus you'll find floorplans of all the must-see sites and reliable street maps. The DK Eyewitness Tokyo Travel Guide explores the culture, history and architecture, not missing the best in entertainment, shopping, tours and scenic walks, in this fascinating city. DK Eyewitness Tokyo Travel Guide – showing you what others only tell you.Now available in ebook(PDF) format.

This book is an attempt to explain Japanese regional structure and associated dynamism in terms of urban systems. It is extremely effective to use the urban systems approach to explain the regional changes in today's Japan, which is undergoing changes wrought by economic globalization and the information revolution. This is because the transformation into a service economy has become the key component of the economic activities of cities, linkages are being mutually strengthened, and regional development is being determined by the interdependency of cities. Readers hoping to gain an understanding of the regional geography of Japan may feel that the structure and content of this book are lacking something. However, it is not the intention of this book to systematically paint a total geographical image of Japan within the context of East Asia. Instead, by focusing on urban systems theory, it might be possible to theorize about the factors related to the changing geography of Japan, such as the growth and decline processes of Japanese urban systems, the strengthening of ties among cities and associated factors, and the expansion of socioeconomic exchanges with cities overseas, from a perspective that is different from the conventional approach.

Japan is one of the most crowded countries on earth, with three-fourths of its population now living in cities. Tokyo is easily the most populous city on the planet. And yet, though closely packed, its citizens dwell together in relative peace. In America, inner-city violence—often attributed in part to overcrowding—is frequently emphasized as one of the great social problems of the day. What might we learn from Japan's situation that could be applied to our own as we approach the twenty-first century? In this collection an interdisciplinary group of international scholars seek to understand and explain the process and characteristics shaping the modern Japanese city. With frequent comparisons to the American city, they consider such topics as urban landscapes, the quality of life in the suburbs, spatial mixing of social classes in the city, land use planning and control, environmental pollution, and images of the city in Japanese literature. The only book on the subject, The Japanese City surveys the important literature and highlights the current issues in urban studies. The numerous photographs, maps, tables, and graphs, combined with the high quality of the contributions, offer a comprehensive look at the contemporary Japanese city. Contributors: William Burton, David L. Callies, Roman Cybriwsky, Kuniko Fujita, Theodore J. Gilman, Richard Child Hill, P.P. Karan, Robert Kidder, Cotton Mather, and Kohei Okamoto.