Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan

Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan The sudden increase in Japan's urban population in the century and a half from the i58os to the mid-700os may well have had no parallel in world history prior to industrialization. Edo, renamed Tokyo in I868, was a cluster of fishing villages around a castle in I590, but, during the eighteenth century, it is readily acknowledged to have been one of the largest, if not the largest, city in the world. Even by I700, Edo was certainly larger than any European city, including London at 575,000, and rivaled or exceeded in population the largest of the Chinese cities at the time, Peking. But urban growth was not limited to Edo; cities sprang up throughout the country from the late sixteenth century on and both Kyoto and Osaka had populations in the hundreds of thousands. By the late eighteenth century, Japan had about 3 percent of the world's population, but it is estimated to have had more than 8 percent of the people in the world who lived in cities of more than I0,000. By this standard, about io percent of the total population of Japan was urban in i8oo.1 To support a metropolitan population, food and other daily necessities must be adequately supplied, and demands for housing, water, transportation, a monetary system, and numerous other requirements must be met. Even if all other requirements are