The story of Tokyo's people begins eight hundred years ago, when Japan was one of the world's most advanced countries, embracing a thriving culture of arts, literature, and music. The capital city near presentday Kyoto —about 250 miles west of Tokyo — was a government and cultural center where dramatic plays, tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and landscape gardening were part of everyday life.

In the late twelfth century, a warrior chief named Yoritomo created a military government, called a shogunate, in a fishing village near present-day Tokyo. Yoritomo became the nation's first military dictator, or shogun, and his system of government was to last for almost seven hundred years. In Tokyo , Beth Reiber describes the shogunate system in its early years:

The period... from 1192 to 1333 is perhaps best known for the unrivaled ascendancy [rise] of the warrior caste, called samurai . Ruled by a rigid...