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Most of the women, if they did not die from the collapsing masonry, died during the resulting fires. Yoshiwara was, at the time, a walled-in district, a city within a city. It struck at around 10 pm, at a time when the brothels of Yoshiwara would have been packed to capacity. In 1855, the huge Ansei Earthquake rocked Edo. Between its founding and its closing with the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1957, the walls of Yoshiwara imprisoned more than 25,000 girls and women, most sold into indentured-prostitution between the ages of seven and twelve. The district is now known as Senzoku, and once housed the pleasure quarter of Edo/Tokyo from 1657 until the mid-20th century. The Throw-Away Temple (Jokanji Temple) is not far from Minowa Station, in a district that is no longer called Yoshiwara, perhaps in an attempt to escape the ghosts of the area’s past. Jokanji Temple (photograph by Jim O’Connell) It connects not only the places that Tokyo wants to display, it also runs by Iriya and Minowa stations, Kodemmacho Station, and Minami-Senju Station, places with a closer connection to the city buried beneath Tokyo: Edo. But the Hibiya Line also stops at some more unusual sites, hidden behind train stations with names that won’t ring any bells. The Hibiya Line of Tokyo’s vast subway network is one of the city’s newest, built to connect those places you’ll find scattered through your guidebooks, including districts like Roppongi, a notorious night-club district Ginza, with its aforementioned Geisha Akihabara, the electronics district and Ueno, with its zoo and museums. Riding the Hibiya Line (photograph by Tokyo Times)
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It is the essence of a modern city, a city on the cutting edge of technology juxtaposed with the occasional quaint and touristy attractions that highlight Japan’s history, like the Geisha in Ginza, or the Zozoji Temple that stands at the feet of Tokyo Tower, itself a bright orange, 300-meter-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Tokyo is now a city of skyscrapers and neon, of more than 35 million people staring into their cell phones. It’s happened so frequently that during the shogunate government (which held power from about 1600 to 1868), Edo was referred to as the “City of Fires.” Between the Tokugawa shogunate and the drone of Allied bombers (as well as by Godzilla and other kaiju since then), first Edo and then Tokyo has been destroyed, on average, every 30 years. Not only was Tokyo thrown on top of it in 1868 when the Emperor moved his court from Kyoto to his new “Eastern Capital” - or “To-kyo” - but it has been razed by fires, by earthquakes, and by Allied firebombing during the Second World War, when half the city was destroyed. Japan old and new (photograph by Ciro Cattuto)Įdo, Japan, grew by 1823 to be one of the world’s largest cities.