Name: How Did Tokyo Become The Largest City On Earth?
Uploaded: 2025-11-13T17:11:42.000Z
Duration: 8 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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It's almost impossible to totally understand how vast Tokyo is with over 41 million people.

Imagine that you take the entire population of Canada and you cram them into a single city.

Anthony Bourdain once said, There's 15 or 20 different Manhattans in Tokyo.

It's time for you to understand how Tokyo became the world's biggest city.

If you're standing in the center of Tokyo, let's say at the Shibuya crossing, how long would it take you to walk from there to the lower density suburban part where people live like this, and

then finally out to the rural area where it starts looking more like this.

I went to Google Maps and I looked around to find the closest big green areas to the center of Tokyo, the ones that didn't look like parks.

That would be a 30 mile, 11 hour walk from the center.

And even once you get to those areas, there's still a lot of city beyond them.

If you wanted to get to the mountains, that would again be another 11 hour walk.

How the hell do people get around a city of this scale?

More than half of the 41 million people in the Tokyo metro area use public transport every single day.

To be a city this large, you have to be able to get around without sitting in traffic too much.

And the traffic in Tokyo can be biblical.

Public transport within Greater Tokyo is dominated by the world's most extensive urban rail network.

This is the rail network for la, Rome, Delhi, and

watch what happens when we overlay the Tokyo rail network.

Shinjuku Station in central Tokyo is the world's busiest railway station, certified by Guinness World Records.

The entire population of Berlin or Los Angeles moves through this station every day.

With over 200 different spots to enter and exit, this station is nauseatingly complicated even for the most efficient public transport system in the world.

With that many people, no matter how many trains you have, some of them are going to get pretty crowded.

Most big cities have a central downtown area where everyone goes and where everything converges.

All of the business, all the shopping, all of the culture.

But Tokyo is so big that many different areas feel themselves like their own.

Downtown, you can be in Shinjuku feels like downtown.

Then hop on the Metro and go 45 minutes in one direction, get out, still feels like downtown.

Hop on the metro again, 45 minutes in another direction, and yep, you're still in downtown.

Many districts of Tokyo specialize into a specific kind of Culture or vibe.

Akihabara is the anime town, a major hub for otaku culture, video games, anime, manga and electronics.

The streets in Akihabara are filled with everything anime culture, and

you'll see cosplayers on the sidewalks all the time.

Harajuku is the center of Japanese youth culture.

You'll see people here wearing all different types of alternative fashion.

It's filled with Buddhist temples, traditional craft shops and traditional festivals.

It has a 12 story Uniqlo, high end department stores, and

people on the street wearing every luxury brand that you can think of.

In the mid-1970s, the UN started to use the term megacity to refer to urban areas that had more than 10 million people.

New York City became the world's first megacity in the 1930s, but Tokyo quickly surpassed it, and

then surpassed it again, and then again, and then again.

Tokyo pioneered many of the systems that we take for granted today.

In a city of that scale, just ask Jeremy Clarkson.

The meters have infrared sensors, so if you come back and feed them every hour, they know you haven't moved your car.

When the traffic's getting sticky, the information is fed to drivers via huge boards located above every major route around the city.

Traffic between Tokyo and Osaka for the tens of millions of people that live there, was getting out of hand.

So they invented the bullet train to fix it.

This super express that thrusts aside all existing ideas of train speed.

They also built the world's largest sewer.

What's fascinating about all this is that 400 years ago, Tokyo didn't exist.

Or it did exist, but it was just a fishing village.

The Warring States period ended with the victory of the Takagawa Shogunate, unifying all of Japan.

The Takagawa moved their de facto capital to Edo, as a result concentrating all political and economic power of Japan in a single city.

As this city grew, it attracted even more powerful people from across the country.

Edo was in the perfect location to grow during this period because it was a port city on Japan's largest flat piece of land.

That meant that there was plenty of food that could be grown in the surrounding area and then easily transported in to the growing hungry population via canals and rivers.

Edo grew so large and so significant that the next 200 years is known to this day as the Edo Period.

Some estimates even put it as the largest city in the world in the 1700s, at over 1 million people.

In the mid-1800s, after 200 years of isolation, Japan opened up to foreign trade and Western ideas, causing rapid social and economic change.

Edo's name was changed to Tokyo during this period eastern capital, and

it began to industrialize rapidly, drawing even more rural people into the city to work in the factories.

Tokyo was becoming a city defined by change.

Change from the fishing village to the capital, change in the form of several great fires that even burned the entire city down multiple times.

But in the end, Tokyo always rose back from the ashes.

Looking at Tokyo in the modern day, one of the most common things I see is all the people on social media talking about how cheap it is to live there.

I would say that the cost ling is still much, much cheaper than the US everywhere.

But the thing is, usually these TikTok posts list prices in dollars, US Dollars.

Americans especially are used to paying American prices for their food and their re.

So when they fly into Japan and the prices are so much lower in dollars, it's a shock.

But meanwhile, in general, Japanese salaries are a lot lower.

Added to this is the whiplash of perception of what Japan is today versus what it was like 30 years ago.

Look at how these news reports from the 90s used to talk about it.

A critical essay on the Japanese challenge to American business.

If you're an American business in a high tech industry competing with the Japanese, you are in the business of going out of business.

There was a time when Japanese salaries exceeded American ones.

One out of every three cars sold in America is Japanese.

And that, along with the recession, spells big trouble for US Automakers.

But then, over time, Japan stagnated and America well surpassed it in only a few decades.