Industry

Since the war Tokyo has taken over from Ōsaka the role of leading industrial centre in the country. The region has a highly diversified manufacturing base. Heavy industries—such as metals, chemicals, machinery, transportation equipment, and oil refining—are concentrated in Chiba, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. Tokyo proper is strongly inclined toward light industry. Most of Japan’s books and much of its electronic equipment, for instance, are produced there.

Commerce and finance

More noteworthy than the concentration of industry is the concentration of management and finance in and near Tokyo. Even companies with factories elsewhere maintain large offices in Tokyo, and the proper corporate location is Marunouchi. There is a good reason for keeping a Tokyo office—proximity to government offices—although a chumminess between managers and bureaucrats is thought by many to be not entirely healthy.

Finance has been more conservative geographically than has management, with Nihonbashi, the commercial and financial centre of Edo, as its main seat. Located there are the Bank of Japan and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Japan’s two most important financial institutions. The latter is much busier than the Ōsaka Stock Exchange, but this may be somewhat misleading: a very large proportion of stocks are in intercompany holdings that do not go on the market. This arrangement is a defense against hostile takeovers and also a continuing assurance of cooperation among the members of the giant conglomerates; but it makes the stock market easily manipulatable and less than ideally subject to market forces.

During the 1980s, as Japan was emerging as an economic superpower, Tokyo suddenly found itself a global financial centre. This remarkable growth rate came to be called the “bubble economy.” The expression refers to speculation in general, but most particularly to land speculation and to Tokyo, where land prices have been the most outrageously exorbitant in the country. By the early 1990s, however, overinflated stock and land prices led to a “bursting” of the bubble, so curious a phenomenon that the Japanese grasp of the word “bubble” seems in doubt. The English word is most commonly used, and when it is put into Japanese (awa) the rendition is “foam” rather than “bubble.” What has happened does seem more like a subsidence of foam than a thorough burst of a bubble.

Transportation

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The emergence of modern Tokyo came at the beginning of the transportation revolution of the late 19th century. The first railroad in Japan was put through from Tokyo to Yokohama in 1872. The city continues to be the most important transportation centre in the country. The busiest rail stations are those accommodating commuters to the western suburbs, but the traveler who wishes to go considerable distances by rail usually leaves from Tokyo station, in Marunouchi, or Ueno station, a couple of miles to the north. Only since 1991 has it been possible to take a Shinkansen express train to northern Japan from Tokyo station, as Ueno was the traditional terminus for northbound travel.

Most international travel is through the highly inconvenient airport at Narita, in Chiba prefecture, at least an hour by rail from central Tokyo. Opened in 1978, the facility has been at the centre of controversy since its inception, mainly because of opposition by landowners to the appropriation of their property. The older, smaller, and rather more convenient airport at Haneda, near the Tama River, accommodates domestic travel and a few international flights. Yokohama still is the most important port in the region, the other major ports being Chiba, Kawasaki, and Tokyo.

Tokyo’s streets are flooded not only with people but also with vehicles, and traffic can become almost gridlocked at busy times and in busy places. There is a good system of roads and express highways in the city and region, but it is woefully inadequate for the crush of traffic. A splendid network of subways and commuter rail lines provides an alternative to the automobile.

Government

The two most populous prefectures of Japan, Tokyo and Ōsaka, are the two smallest in area. Though somewhat larger than Ōsaka, Tokyo occupies roughly a third of the premodern province of Musashi, the remainder of which is in Saitama prefecture. Tokyo and Ōsaka were two of the three urban prefectures (fu) established in 1872, the third being Kyōto. The thinking seems to have been that the two should be just that, metropolitan complexes—each essentially a city and its suburbs—and the smaller they were, the more easily they could be controlled. Kyōto, which was not expected to grow like the other two and did not, was not so treated.

The expansion of the city in 1932 made the city limits coincide with the prefectural boundaries in all directions but the west, where lay the “county part” of the prefecture, as distinguished from the “ward part.” The amalgamation of city and prefecture and establishment of the metropolitan prefecture in 1943 made the largest municipality in the land the only one without a mayor. The county part now consists largely of incorporated cities, all of which have mayors.

Legislative authority in the metropolis rests with the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, consisting of 127 members elected to 4-year terms. The principal elected official is the prefectural governor, who has authority over a number of administrative commissions and commissioners, including the fire department and those for public works. Each of the 23 wards has a popularly elected council and ward head, with limited authority over local matters.