Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: how the shogun's ancient capital became a great modern city, 1867-1923

Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: how the shogun's ancient capital became a great modern city, 1867-1923 by Seidensticker, Edward. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780674539396.

This book looks at the metamorphosis of Japan from a country with little contact with the outside world to one brimming with Western ideas and technologies. Seidensticker focuses on Tokyo in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the earthquake of 1923 to illustrate this change. He shows how Tokyo, which was called Edo until 1867, emerged from being the shoguns capital and the biggest city in a country which had been closed to the outside world for two and a half centuries, to a modern city, open to Western ideas.