What did it mean for Tokyo to become an imperial capital (teito)? Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the city rose to a position of global prominence alongside other cosmopolitan urban centers such as London, Paris, and New York. A variety of factors contributed to the modernization of Tokyo and its political and cultural ascendancy, including the adaptation of Western bureaucratic structures by the Japanese state, Japanese colonial expansion in East Asia, a dramatic increase in the urban population, the proliferation of popular media, and new forms of transportation, inhabitation, and consumption. These material changes also produced changes of the imagination, radically reshaping the urban experience and necessitating new modes of representation.

In its assemblage of people and capital, the metropolis produced an image of prosperity, modernity, and order that was integral to Tokyo's identity as an imperial capital. Through my reading of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese-language texts from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, I probe the limitations of this image, examining the ways in which authors contested the boundaries imposed by empire and modernity. Nagai Kafû, Tayama Katai, Weng Nao, Yi Sang, and Sata Ineko negotiated the affective dimensions of place and space, projecting a kaleidoscopic vision of urban life. It is here that the conflict between the image of the imperial capital and the lived experience of the city are most palpable.

I argue that to define Tokyo as a modern imperial capital is to map the city along two trajectories, linking it with both the imperial West and the (semi)colonial East. The convergence of these two trajectories results in a kind of double exposure. No single image of Tokyo is clear and distinct; rather, the different images coexist in a state of simultaneity. This fundamental irresolution of Japanese modernity and imperialism inscribes Tokyo with profound tension and unevenness, but it also opens the city to moments of cosmopolitan possibility.