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."