New Books In East Asian Studies

How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorous start, as a backwater on Japan’s eastern coast before Tokugawa decided to make it his de facto capital. Eiko Maruko Siniawer picks ten distinct moments in Edo’s, and then Tokyo’s, history to show how this village became one of the world’s most important cities. Moments like a brief crackdown on kabuki theater, or the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics make up the chapters of what’s appropriately titled Ten Moments That Shaped Tokyo (Cambridge University Press: 2025) Eiko is the Charles R. Keller Professor of History at Williams College. A historian of modern Japan who has researched a wide range of topics, she is the author of three books—Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960 (Cornell University Press: 2015), Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press: 2024), and Ten Moments That Shaped Tokyo. S