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This chapter describes the optimistic views of the Japanese elite who saw the Great Kantō Earthquake as an opportunity to create a “new” Tokyo that would be free from the social ills and afflictions of the “old” Tokyo. In the minds of many bureaucrats, urban planners, and social welfare advocates, the earthquake altered the landscape of the capital literally and figuratively. Postdisaster Tokyo not only reflected destruction but also inspired dreams of what Tokyo could become. These individuals saw the disaster as a destroyer of a city that Japan, the people of Tokyo, and the state had outgrown, but a city whose residents and leaders were unable and unwilling to alter if it meant personal loss or sacrifice. Tokyoites were then given the kōki or golden opportunity to create a new imperial capital that would not only initiate Tokyo's renaissance but also serve as a symbol of Japan's modern emergence to the world.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the history of Republican Beijing. The book brings together the political, economic, social, and cultural forces in Beijing life involved in the transformation of the old imperial capital, and its recreation as the cultural city of modern China. The chapter describes the spatial transformations, the city's material life, and representations of the city. It stresses the importance of the years of Nationalist rule in Beijing's history.

This chapter is organized into four parts. The first examines the reinvention of Tokyo as imperial capital during the Meiji era. The second considers how looking to the past was necessary in order for Japan to move forward. Museums were important in this process. Participation in international exhibitions and the holding of domestic industrial exhibitions also helped the Japanese to envision a future led by science and technology. The third part focuses on how Japan put itself on display abroad, and on the educational value of showcasing its achievements and foreign know-how at home. The fourth part examines how Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), mayor of Tokyo and then home minister, sought to rebuild Tokyo according to “scientific” principles after the Great Earthquake of 1923.

The introduction explains the important relationship between Chang’an and Tang literati writers, arguing that they serve as intermediary between the city and text. It gives a brief contextualized introduction to the Chang’an as both an imperial capital and a site for collective life. It discusses the nature and provenance of the book’s major textual sources, arguing for a need to reconceptualize and reimagine these texts as workings of the cultural imagination, rather than confined to bibliographic categories and regulated within generic boundaries. It also introduces the theoretical models used throughout the book, as related to the concepts of liminality, spatial practice, and the production of space.

This chapter examines how the Japanese government and media instilled into the populace the culture of renewal and reconstruction needed to form a true modern, imperial capital. Political leaders understood that the people would have to perceive the Great Kantō Earthquake, which was in fact a regional catastrophe, into national tragedy that would necessitate a long and expensive program of reconstruction. Through speeches and ceremonial events, colorful lithograph prints and pictorial postcards, harrowing survivor accounts that often lionized selfless behavior, objects taken from the destruction, images and evocations of the dead, and documentary movies, government officials, the media, and other institutions constructed the earthquake as an unprecedented national calamity that needed a humanitarian response unseen before. The chapter also talks about how these institutions used the analogy of war when describing the carnage of the earthquake, claiming outright that the sacrifice of those who were killed would be remunerated in the form of a new capital.

This chapter explores some of the political implications of the increasing interest in trade taken by Byzantine aristocrats in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It reveals an entirely unexpected but highly important dimension to Constantinople — the loss of the city's hinterland to the Turks in the late fourteenth century and the diversification of the economic interests of the urban political elite into trade meant that by the fifteenth century Constantinople had many of the characteristics of an Italian city-state rather than of an imperial capital. Many of those who were assumed to be the upholders of an exclusive and defensive Byzantine identity turned out to be janus-faced: simultaneously loyal subjects and highly placed servants of the Byzantine emperor but also citizens of Italian cities, especially Genoa and Venice.

This introductory chapter provides an insight into the events that happened during and after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Referred locally as the Kantō daishinsai, the calamity was one of the most destructive natural disasters of the twentieth century. In less than three days, more than 100,000 people perished. Almost immediately after the quake hit, thousands were crushed by falling objects or died in collapsed buildings. However, amidst all of the destruction, political elites and other professionals saw an opportunity to create a true, modern, imperial capital from the rubbles of Tokyo. The chapter talks about how the earthquake amplified many social, political, and economic promises that had already begun to define the increasingly contoured landscape of interwar Japan. It studies how politicians and bureaucratic elites across cultures and from diverse political systems regularly make opportunistic and idealistic calls for reconstruction and renewal following major natural disasters for political and ideological ends.