The Uncomfortable Politics Behind the History of Urban Fires As
a historian of Japan, Georgetown University professor Jordan
Sand had long been intrigued by one odd quirk of its historic
capital, Edo (better known today as Tokyo). It burned a lot.
Like, constantly. In the 1700s, people there lived with the
expectation that their homes might catch fire with about the
same frequency that today we batten down the hatches for a
summer storm. Eighteenth Century Edo wasn’t particularly good at
fighting fires. But people there grew adept at dismantling
buildings in the path of one, only to put them back together
again. "This is this enormous city for pre-modern times of a
million people, and dozens of blocks would burn every three or
four years," Sand says. "It was not at all unusual to see a fire
in which two or three-thousand houses were destroyed any given
winter." Winter spanned the dry, cold months. "It can’t be
completely unique," Sand recalls thinking of this fiery
phenomenon. "And yet, it does seem like an u