Tokyo is one of the biggest urban areas on Earth, a megacity by any measure. But most people don’t know that Tokyo is not a city in legal terms. In 1943, Tokyo City and Tokyo Prefecture were merged, and the new entity was called the Tokyo Metropolis. The shift was wartime policy and it redrew how the capital would be run from then on. It turned Tokyo into a different kind of capital with a different legal shape.
Before the change, Tokyo worked like other big cities, even as it expanded rapidly in the early 20th century. But Japan was at total war, and the national government wanted tighter control of the capital. In 1943, the city was abolished and folded into the prefecture for wartime efficiency, with a metropolitan system under tighter central control.
The core of the former city became wards under the metropolis rather than a single city hall. In the postwar reforms, the Local Autonomy Law took effect in 1947 and the present 23 special-ward system began that same year. The wards gained elected leadership and local powers, but the overall structure remained a two-level system with a strong metropolitan government at the top. In practice, the metropolis runs citywide and regionwide services like major planning, transportation, and policing, while the wards handle neighborhood services like schools, waste, and local roads.
After the war, Japan democratized, but Tokyo’s metropolitan system remained. The wards gained elected leadership and more local authority, yet the two-level structure stayed intact. Tokyo still runs both city-level and prefecture-level functions at once. In places like New York City, the city government sits under a separate state government; in Tokyo, the metropolis is both city and prefecture at the same time.Go deeper: Tokyo City Profile and Government 2023
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