By exercising military pressure, they got the Japanese government to sign international treaties, which led to a few extraterritorial settlements for foreign residents on Japanese soil. Around 1850, the western nations tried to end the isolationistic Japanese foreign policy in order to establish supply stations for the China trade and provide support for castaways. After he received the title of shogun in 1603, Edo served as Japan’s de-facto capital for more than 250 years. It gained in importance when Tokugawa Ieyasu seized the Kanto region in 1590. This chapter will focus on what had to happen in terms of architecture to make Tokyo a modern city and on how the Japanese government, local authorities and the Tokyoites created a global image along the way.Ĥ Initially named Edo, Tokyo started out as a fishing settlement that got a castle in 1457. And seen with the eyes of an architectural historian, it misses yet another point: images that serve as visual media but also indicate and shape a city’s self-perception.ģ The interdisciplinary approach of this publication allows us to add some thoughts about the possibility to construct a city’s image in visual terms. Seen from a humanist perspective, this definition misses the point by ignoring parameters like cultural heritage, tourism or education, parameters expressed in textual media or pieces of art. Is that what makes a global city?Ģ In fact, the usual standards to define a global city draw on financial data and statistics. And one knows that, somewhere in the middle of all this, there are trade facilities and businesses, the stock exchange and company headquarters. 1 Thinking about New York, probably the only undisputed global city, brings images to mind: high-rise buildings, streets bustling with people from diverse ethnical backgrounds and understandings of fashion, roads jammed with cars and buses, railroad tracks below and above and advertisement all over.
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