Tokyo is the capital city of Japan and the country’s principal political, economic, and cultural center.
The city began as a settlement called Edo. In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Tokugawa shogunate there, making Edo the seat of national political power. In 1868, during the Meiji Restoration, Emperor Meiji moved the imperial residence from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital.”
Tokyo’s metropolitan area is one of the world’s largest urban regions. The city contains Japan’s National Diet, the official residence of the prime minister, and the Imperial Palace. It is also a major center for finance, technology, publishing, and transportation.
Kyoto was Japan’s imperial capital for more than a thousand years, so it remains an important historical city. That long association sometimes causes confusion, but Tokyo has been Japan’s national capital since the nineteenth-century political transformation.