How a Fishing Village Became Tokyo, the Biggest City on Earth

You are standing on a flat, marshy plain where a slow brown river spills into a wide, calm bay. There is no city here. No castle, no tower, no name the world would know. In a little over four hundred years, this exact spot will hold the largest city the human race has ever built. So why here? In this video you stand on the bare marsh that became Tokyo and let the map explain it. You see how the Kanto Plain, Japan's biggest flat lowland, and a sheltered bay gave the spot room, water, and trade. You watch a samurai raise Edo Castle in 1457, Tokugawa Ieyasu make it his base in 1590, the shoguns' alternate-attendance system swell Edo to a million people, and the city rise again and again from fire, the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, and the firebombing of 1945 to become a megacity of nearly 37 million. If the map made it click for you, drop a like, tell me which city you want next in the comments, and subscribe for more on why the world's great cities stand exactly where they do. #Tokyo #TokyoHistory #Edo #Japan #JapanHistory #KantoPlain #Geography #CityHistory #UrbanHistory #HistoricalGeography #Megacity #WorldCities #CityOrigins #TokugawaIeyasu #MeijiRestoration #Shogun #SankinKotai #MapHistory #HistoryDocumentary #WhyHere