Tokyo , officially Tokyo Metropolis , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan and located on the eastern side of the main island Honsh?. The twenty-three special wards of Tokyo, each governed as a city, cover the area that was once the city of Tokyo in the eastern part of the prefecture, and total over 8 million people. The population of the prefecture exceeds 12 million.
Tokyo is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family.
Name
Tokyo was originally known as Edo, meaning estuary. Its name was changed to Tokyo + ky? ) when it became the imperial capital in 1868. During the early Meiji period, the city was also called "T?kei", an alternative pronunciation for the same Chinese characters representing "Tokyo". Some surviving official English documents use the spelling "Tokei". This pronunciation is now obsolete.
History
Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo. In 1457, ?ta D?kan built Edo Castle. In 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu made Edo his base and when he became shogun in 1603, the town became the center of his nationwide military government. During the subsequent Edo period, Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world with a population topping one million by the 18th century. It became the de facto capital of Japan even while the emperor lived in Kyoto, the imperial capital. After about 263 years, the shogunate was overthrown under the banner of restoring imperial rule. In 1869, the 17-year-old Emperor Meiji moved to Edo. Tokyo was already the nation's political and cultural center, and the emperor's residence made it a de facto imperial capital as well with the former Edo Castle becoming the Imperial Palace. The city of Tokyo was established, and continued to be the capital until it was abolished as a municipality in 1943 and merged with the "Metropolitan Prefecture" of Tokyo.
Central Tokyo, like Osaka, has been designed since about the turn of the century to be centered around major train stations in a high-density fashion[citation needed], so suburban railways were built relatively cheaply at street level and with their own right-of-way
