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Castle towns in the 17th century numbered over two hundred,<ref>Moriya, Katsuhisa. Ronald Toby (trans.) "Urban Networks and Information Networks." in Chie Nakane and Shinzaburô Ôishi (eds.) ''Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern Japan''. University of Tokyo Press, 1990. p104.</ref> and by 1700 Japan was home to some of the largest cities in the world. Roughly ten percent of the total population of the archipelago was already living in cities as early as the 1640s. By 1700, [[Edo]] is believed to have had a population of roughly one million; [[Osaka]] and [[Kyoto]] were home to roughly 300,000, and the ''daimyô'' seats of [[Nagoya]] and [[Kanazawa]] boasted around 100,000 people each.
Castle towns in the 17th century numbered over two hundred,<ref>Moriya, Katsuhisa. Ronald Toby (trans.) "Urban Networks and Information Networks." in Chie Nakane and Shinzaburô Ôishi (eds.) ''Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern Japan''. University of Tokyo Press, 1990. p104.</ref> and by 1700 Japan was home to some of the largest cities in the world. Roughly ten percent of the total population of the archipelago was already living in cities as early as the 1640s. By 1700, [[Edo]] is believed to have had a population of roughly one million; [[Osaka]] and [[Kyoto]] were home to roughly 300,000, and the ''daimyô'' seats of [[Nagoya]] and [[Kanazawa]] boasted around 100,000 people each.
Despite a considerable degree of ''daimyô'' autonomy within their respective domains, and cultural differences from one end of the archipelago to another, the vast majority of castle towns resembled one another quite closely in a number of respects: most had districts of samurai residences closely clustered around the castle, and [[chonin|townsperson (commoner)]] neighborhoods officially divided up by occupation; most also matched one another quite closely in the width of their roads, residential architectural styles, and certain other aspects of urban layout overall. Castles themselves were often surrounded by moats and walls, but the city as a whole not, unlike in China and many parts of Europe where a city wall defined the bounds of the urban space. In Japan, by contrast, cities or towns bled into farmland, with no city walls.<ref>Chie Nakane, "Tokugawa Society," in Nakane & Ôishi, 214.</ref>
==References==
==References==
