THE LARGEST CITY

The world's most populous city is connected to the rest of the country by high-speed bullet trains but is itself a crazy quilt of traffic-blocking narrow lanes, which one writer fondly called Tokyo's "comfortable old streets." The city was called Edo until the shoguns were swept away by the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the emperor established his court here and renamed the city Tokyo. The center of Tokyo is the Imperial Palace; all around it are newer buildings erected in the wake of the terrible earthquake and fire of 1923 and the devastation rained upon the city in World War II. Tokyo boasts 30 percent of Japan's university students, and features numerous museums. But business, especially the service industry, dominates Tokyo, with almost 800,000 separate companies hard at work, many in the area around the Imperial Palace.