Fires and Fight: Urban Conflagration, Governance, and Society in Edo-Tokyo, 1657--1890

A popular saying has it that fires and fights were the "flowers of Edo," the city that was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Building on the notion that fire and social contention were linked for much of the city's history, this dissertation argues that fighting fire and fighting about fire were integral to the formation and historical development of Edo society between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.;Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the mix of environmental and sociocultural factors that left Edo vulnerable to conflagration, demonstrating that the inhabitants of Edo chose to accept the prevalence of fire rather than take aggressive measures to eliminate the problem. The four chapters that follow are about how that choice created an urban ecosystem where fire served as a medium through which social relations were structured and maintained.;Chapter 2 examines the characteristics shared by arsonists and the relations to the groups and individuals they targeted, as well as the processes of investigation and legal deliberation that bound ruling elites and urban residents of all social strata together in relationships of mutual dependence. Chapter 3 is a social history of the townsman firefighters, whose story shows how a group's identity and the roles it played in Edo society depended on its relationship with the city's fires. Chapter 4 focuses on the non-violent strategies that company foremen employed to promote their group's collective interests, even as they reinforced a hierarchy in which firefighters were assigned a subordinate position. Chapter 5 examines the issue of castle defense, demonstrating how the Tokugawa regime's increasing reliance on townsman firefighters to protect the loci of shogunal authority complicated relations between the shogunate, the firefighters, and the elite townsfolk who sponsored them. The epilogue discusses the role that Edo's firefighters played in Tokyo for decades after the Meiji Restoration, even as the political and cultural transformations of the late nineteenth century made their traditional position in society increasingly untenable.