Ever-Changing Tokyo

These maps show the changes in population, land prices, and number of large office buildings constructed in the Tokyo metropolitan area from the 1960s to today. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Japan experienced a bubble economy where the price of real estate escalated dramatically. Tokyo has a center named Marunouchi and three sub- centers—Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Shibuya. Land prices in these areas were extremely high during the bubble economy, visible in the land price “mountain” in the middle column.

As a result, the distribution of office building construction changed. Large office buildings were built in central Marunouchi in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1980s to the 1990s, building construction moved to areas around the Marunouchi district. After the bubble burst, land prices came down and the construction of office buildings returned to central Marunouchi. The residential population also changed over this period. The national population peaked in 2005, but in the Tokyo metropolitan area, it has been decreasing since the 1970s.

Courtesy of Center for Spatial Information Science, University of Tokyo.