A first wave of excitable western tourists began pouring into Japan 150 years ago. Among them was the English explorer Isabella Bird, who, in the late 1870s, journeyed through a country going through a profound and fascinating period of change. Nowhere was it more pronounced than in a city torn between a glorious past and an uncertain future. It even had two names, depending on whether a person preferred to look backwards or forwards. The old name was Edo; the new one, ‘Tokyo’: ‘Eastern Capital’. Following a brief and chaotic civil war in 1868-9, a new generation of modernising leaders had thrown open Japan’s doors to the world and the country had embarked upon one of history’s most ambitious processes of national renewal.

Isabella Bird got her first taste of this transformation on her way into Tokyo. She travelled there from the port city of Yokohama not, as most would have done just a few years before, in a palanquin or cart, but via a newly-built railway line. Arriving at Tokyo’s Shinbashi station, which was opened in 1872 by the emperor himself, Bird heard the sound of the train sink beneath the ‘combined clatter of 400 clogs’ as 200 Japanese passengers disembarked. Few had yet adopted western dress. The scene was instead one of lean figures dressed in kimono, the women with their hair worn tied up in buns, and some of the men with heads shaved at the front and hair left long at the back.

Bird was met off the train by a Mr Davies from the British Legation in Tokyo. He bore the scars of the chaos from which Japan had not long emerged – quite literally so, having been injured when samurai opposed to a growing foreign presence in Japan tried to murder the British envoy Sir Harry Parkes in 1868. Together they made their way to the British Legation, past lines of quietly imposing buildings featuring ‘highly ornamental gateways’. Bird encountered ‘miles of moats’ along the route, too, alongside steep grassy embankments and great stone foundations.

Bird’s journey from Shinbashi to the British Legation was taking her through the very centre of power in the new Japan. An imperial palace would soon stand on those stone foundations: the country’s new leaders were mainly unknown middle-ranking samurai from south-western Japan, who had hauled a teenaged emperor out of his home in Kyoto and installed him in Tokyo as a figurehead for their reforms. The ornamental gateways that Bird noted led into buildings that were in the process of being turned into government ministries and barracks for a new conscript army.

Impressed and gratified though westerners were with the speed at which Japan was adopting and adapting their ways of life, most visitors were more interested in Edo than Tokyo. It had, for a time, been the world’s largest city; the beating heart of a country mostly at peace with itself and its neighbours. Edo gave its name to an era of Japanese history, running from the early 1600s until the mid-1850s, which many modern Japanese soon came to associate with a simpler, even idyllic form of life, free from the challenges and dilemmas to which contact with the modern West had given rise.

Edo owed its thriving early-modern existence to a single family: the Tokugawa. In the closing decades of the 16th century, Tokugawa Ieyasu emerged as one of the most powerful of Japan’s feuding warlords. A great victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 led to his appointment as shogun; de facto ruler of a newly united country. He turned his home base, the modest castle-town of Edo, into Japan’s political capital and ordered the country’s feudal lords to contribute materials and manpower to its expansion.

Vast quantities of stone, timber and precious metals were shipped into Edo as part of a building boom, whose sheer scale led early-modern environmentalists to fear for the future of Japan’s forests. The centrepiece of the project was Edo Castle, on which some 300,000 men laboured at any given time. The final structure featured several moated castle areas within a larger complex, providing separate accommodation for a retired shogun, a serving shogun and a successor. The perimeter was ten miles long. Ieyasu’s son Hidetada was shogun during the main phase of the building work (1605-14) and, in order to facilitate his daily progress inspections, tea-rooms had to be established at various points around the site so that he might rest and refresh himself.

The Tokugawa shogunate required every feudal lord to spend alternating years living in Edo, so that the shogun might keep an eye on them. During the year spent back at home in his own domain, each lord had to leave his family behind in Edo, effectively as hostages. It was a clever system: effective surveillance with the added benefit of all but bankrupting the lords, such was the cost of maintaining a suitably lavish home in Edo and funding regular trips between Edo and the provinces in full retinue.

Some of the lords had their Edo residences built within the moated areas of the castle. Others set up home atop the seven hills that lay to the north and west of the castle: the so-called ‘high city’, in contrast to the ‘low city’ southwards and eastwards towards Edo Bay where commoners had their homes. Far from the dreary government offices that were emerging by the time Bird visited Japan, these lordly estates were the last word in luxury. Hidden behind strong defensive walls and those ornamental gateways were compounds and landscaped gardens whose designs harked back to Japan’s classical Heian era. Drinking water was brought in via aqueducts and wooden pipes, while raw sewage was taken care of by raw commerce: human waste was collected and sold as fertiliser – a trade sufficiently valuable that fights sometimes broke out over disputed rights.

The lords and their families, together with the Tokugawa family’s retainers, occupied around 70 per cent of Edo’s land. Half of what remained was given over to Shintō shrines and Buddhist temples, offering not just places of worship but vital means of protection for the city and the country at large. That left only around 15 per cent of the city for the often rather cramped quarters of the merchants and artisans who catered to the needs of the samurai. These homes tended to be long and narrow, with limited frontage onto the street. That changed across the course of the 1600s and 1700s, as some of the city’s merchants became as wealthy as lords: a source of great tension in Edo Japan, between merchants given to flaunting their riches and low-level samurai who enjoyed the right to wear swords and silk clothing but whose means might be rather meagre.

Alongside its roads, the city of Edo was served by a network of waterways, used to transport goods and lined with shops and restaurants. Of all the new bridges built over Edo’s rivers and canals, the grandest was Nihonbashi: the ‘Japan Bridge’, completed in 1604 and famed for its fish market. Edo’s waterways led ultimately out into Edo Bay, an enormous natural harbour from where a network of shipping routes ran around the coasts of Japan’s four main islands: Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku.

In Edo, as in Osaka – famed in this era for its cuisine and its status as a trading and finance hub – merchant wealth helped to pay for an expanding range of arts and entertainments, of the kind that 19th-century westerners would one day come to treasure. Most of these were to be found inside each city’s pleasure quarters: the Yoshiwara district, in the case of Edo. A man with a bit of money to spare could enjoy a long, leisurely evening in such places, packed as they were with restaurants, tea-houses, bath-houses and theatres. Where everyday life in Edo Japan could be oppressively rule-bound, so intent were the shoguns on managing the lives of all classes in society, a place like Yoshiwara offered an escape into fantasy. People called it the ‘floating world’, or ukiyo: originally a Buddhist term for the melancholy reality of impermanence, now used to evoke the ephemeral quality of the thrills to be had on a good night out.

For its mostly male clientele, the company of women was a major part of the attraction of Yoshiwara. A man with relatively little money or class might make do with a country girl forced by circumstances to sell sex. Others would hope to be hosted by one of the courtesan elite: the daughter of a samurai, perhaps, lavishly dressed and accessorised and able to entertain her clients with songs, dances, stories and witty repartee. It was out of this tradition that geisha – meaning a ‘person of accomplishment’ – emerged in the second half of the 1700s. While the highest tier of courtesans might offer sexual services to clients, geisha – in theory, at least – would not.

A place like Yoshiwara was not devoid of rules. It simply had different ones, mostly revolving around money and a certain savoir faire required to navigate its various enticements without embarrassing oneself. This was where another great innovation of the Edo era came in: woodblock printing. Text and illustrations were produced by calligraphers and artists committing their words and images to thin sheets of paper, each of which would then be pasted onto a block of cherry wood. The block was carved so that the words and images stood out in relief, ready for washing, inking and the application of printing paper. Hundreds of prints could be made from a single set of blocks.

If you were new to Yoshiwara and lacked the benefit of a friend in the know, you could buy or borrow a guidebook to the district. In the same way, if you were one of an increasing number of merchants who wanted to give the appearance of being cultured by attending a Nō play – a slow, quiet and famously difficult form of theatre – you could avail yourself of the equivalent of a bluffer’s guide. Men of simpler tastes might just want to take home a woodblock print of a favourite courtesan, sumo wrestler or kabuki actor. This last was an entirely new form of work and celebrity in the Edo era. Kabuki started out as comic sketches, often with sexual themes, before developing into full plays and offering a notoriously raucous form of all-day entertainment. Alongside kabuki ran bunraku: puppet theatre, whose large and life-like puppets could be made to perform tragic tales of love and suicide, or else swashbuckling samurai stories full of dramatic feats of physical action that would have been beyond the means of even the most accomplished kabuki actor.

Two of Edo’s greatest woodblock print artists were Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858). The latter was celebrated, both at home and in time abroad, for his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō. The popularity of the latter series hinted at a love of travel during the Edo period. One had to have a reason to leave one’s home village or town, to offer to the officials who guarded the major thoroughfares. Many people chose pilgrimage: simple, cheap and unarguable as a motive for being on the road. One of the most well-trodden routes was the Tōkaidō: the road running between Edo and Kyoto, offering stunning views of Mount Fuji along the way. The ‘stations’ of Hiroshige’s title were the waypoints where travellers could find food, rest and do a spot of shopping.

Travel of a more meditative kind in this era was intimately associated with Matsuo Bashō, a poet from Edo whose haiku made him famous around the world. Under Buddhist influence, Bashō became convinced of the value of wandering free from attachments, and of developing the discipline required to make long journeys away from the amenities of popular routes like the Tōkaidō. As he put it in The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi): ‘the journey itself is home’. One of his best-loved haiku was composed by the River Koromo in northern Japan. Bashō recalled the presence there, centuries before, first of the Emperor’s ancient conscript army and later Minamoto forces fighting in a samurai civil war. Weeping, he wrote:

Summer grass –

All that remains

Of warriors’ dreams.

The authorities largely tolerated the pleasure districts and the broader arts of the cities as a useful outlet: better that people relieve their frustrations in these ways than take to the streets in protest or – worse by far – foment rebellion in some distant domain. Still, major playwrights such as Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), at work in Kyoto and later Osaka, had to be careful to avoid the impression that they were criticising the government. Plays dealing with current events, often written and staged within weeks of a particular episode, generally stuck to personal themes – love and duty were great favourites – rather than politics. When playwrights did seek to make some political or social point, it was generally safer to do so via a period piece, thereby maintaining a degree of plausible deniability.

By the time that western countries came knocking on Japan’s door in the mid-19th century, seeking trade and diplomatic relationships, Edo was already in trouble. Those within the shogunate who were charged with managing Japan’s economy struggled with inflation, famine, and with the conflicting price demands of those who produced rice and those who only consumed it. Lower-ranking samurai in particular were incensed at central leadership so poor that some of them had been forced to sell off swords, armour and even daughters to merchants in order to make ends meet. The inadequacy of that leadership was brought home when the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Edo Bay in 1853, leading a flotilla of steamships carrying enough combined firepower to flatten Edo entirely – while the samurai called out to stand guard on the surrounding hills carried in their hands guns that were old enough to be museum pieces.

The tensions that followed inspired a new genre of woodblock printing: one could now find sumo wrestlers throwing absurdly-dressed foreigners to the ground, alongside calls to reinstate the emperor to political power and do away with the shogunate. The heated, sometimes violent debates about Japan’s future that followed gave rise to the rapidly-changing landscape encountered by Bird when she visited Tokyo in the late 1870s. A fire had by this point destroyed Edo Castle and moves were afoot to replace it with an imperial palace. Meanwhile, the repurposing of old lordly mansions as government offices and barracks underscored a profound shift in Japan: from a feudal and regional society led by warriors to a centralised one led by civilians – samurai status having been abolished in 1871.

The old waterways were steadily superseded by trains and trams, over which soon hung a latticework of telegraph and telephone lines. Machine noises competed with human hustle and bustle to provide the city’s soundtrack and, as new buildings went up – some, now, in brick and stone rather than wood – the old views across to Mount Fuji or out to the sea began to close up. Bird was perhaps fortunate to visit when she did: at a time when, in her words, Japan offered ‘as much novelty perhaps as an excursion to another planet’.

Although she didn’t know it, Bird herself was part of the problem. Visiting Sensō-ji, one of the guardian temples of Edo, she noted that the neighbourhood was full of ‘numerous places of entertainment, innocent and vicious… restaurants, tea-houses, minor theatres, and the resorts of dancing and singing girls’. All good fun, and precisely the sort of thing that her readers back home wanted to read about. But Japan’s politicians and journalists were increasingly sensitive to foreign criticism of their country’s affairs, and Bird’s words were undoubtedly a form of criticism: patronising at best, at worst, implying a relative moral backwardness among the Japanese.

Nor were the country’s leaders especially pleased to find woodblock prints by Edoites such Hiroshige and Hokusai being admired and even collected abroad, by artists including Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet. They were too bound up with the seedier sides of Edo’s past. With the same rationale in mind, efforts were made to tame kabuki, turning it from a noisy all-day affair where people could come and go and eat and drink as they pleased into something resembling western opera: sanitised, civilised and enjoyed in respectful silence.

As Edo evolved into Tokyo, much was lost but a great deal was gained. The city became home to new universities and cafés, alongside newspapers and magazines, where the future shape of Japan was debated. It became a place where goods and cuisine from all over the world could be found. New factories and laboratories sprang up, competing in time for real estate with shops, cinemas, music venues and department stores. For better and for worse, Japan’s emergence as Asia’s first modern power was plotted here.

There were surely few cities on Earth that could match young Tokyo’s claim in the late-19th century to be hosting, embodying even, brand-new and exhilaratingly uncertain experiments in living. Still, there must have been moments when a newly-minted ‘Tokyo-ite’ sat with prints of Hiroshige’s views of Edo before her – old boats bobbing in a moonlit bay; Mount Fuji looming protectively over low-rise wooden shops and homes – and wonder quite what sort of bargain her city and her country were making with the modern world.