EDO (EH-doh)
Former
name of Tokyo
Common
clues: Tokyo,
formerly; Tokyo, once; Shogun's capital; Old Tokyo; Tokyo before
1868; Fishing village that became Tokyo; 19th-century samurai
home
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
8 times a year
Frequency
in English language:
56319 / 86800
News:
“100
Years of Tokyo Transportation”
Video:
Edo
Castle Ruins
Even
monkeys fall from trees ~ Japanese
proverb
Edo,
once also spelled Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of the
Japanese capital Tokyo. The pronunciation is "eh-doh."
While there had been early settlements on the hills at Tokyo Bay
for several centuries, the first major event in the history of
Edo was the building of the Edo Castle in 1457 by Ota Dokan.
Stone
foundation of the main tower at Edo Castle.
The
Tokugawa shogunate was established in 1603 with Edo as its seat
of government (de facto capital). (The emperor's residence, and
formal capital, remained in Kyoto, that city had been the actual
capital of Japan until that time.)
Edo
was devastated repeatedly by fires, the Meireki no Taika of 1657
perhaps having been the most serious one: an estimated 100,000
people perished in the flames. During the Edo period, there were
about one hundred fires, typically caused by accidents when the
mostly wooden townhouses (Machiya) were heated with charcoal
fires in winter.
In
1868, when the shogunate came to an end, the city was renamed
"Tokyo" which means "Eastern Capital"; during
the restoration, the emperor moved to Tokyo, making the city the
formal as well as de facto capital of Japan.
During
the Edo period, the Shogunate appointed administrators (machi
bugyo) to oversee the government of Edo. They oversaw the police
and (from the time of Yoshimune onward) the commoner fire
department (machibikeshi), heard criminal and civil suits, and
performed other administrative functions necessary in a city of a
million inhabitants.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Edo".
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