If we talk about the number of fatalities and the degree of destruction, three major disasters stand out in Japan. Two are well known: the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, which reached 8.3 on the Richter scale and claimed the lives of about one hundred and fifty thousand people, and Operation Meetinghouse of 1945, an air raid on Tokyo during World War II that was the most devastating bombing in history (excluding nuclear ones), with one hundred and twenty thousand deaths. The third was the Great Fire of Meireki, which, over three days in 1657, ravaged Edo and even endangered the shōgun himself.

Meireki is not a place but rather a specific time period within the Edo Period (also called the Era of Uninterrupted Peace), which lasted from 1603 to 1868 under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Meireki Era spanned three specific years, beginning in 1655 with the enthronement of the 111th emperor, Go-Sai, and ending in 1658. It was situated between the end of the Jōō Era and the beginning of the Manji Era, both also lasting three years each. The transition from one era to another was marked by significant events, and, as mentioned, the fire was one of them.

Another name often given to this catastrophe is the Furisode Fire, which is also not a place name; furisode means “swinging sleeves.” It refers to a type of kimono, usually made of silk, characterized by its long, flowing sleeves, which, in the oburisode variety, can extend down to the ankles, exceeding one meter in length. The furisode emerged in the mid-16th century with short sleeves and was originally a children’s garment, worn by both boys and girls of the upper class. Over time, it transitioned into an adult garment that parents gifted to their daughters when they reached adulthood.

Japan Fire Edo Tokio Yakuza
Two maiko (apprentice geisha) wearing furisode. Credit: Jon Rawlinson / Wikimedia Commons / Flickr

Today, only maiko (apprentice geishas) wear it, but five hundred years ago, it was widespread and may have contributed to the legend explaining the fire’s origin. According to this legend, Azabu, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Ueno, visited the Honmyō-ji Temple of the Nichiren Buddhist sect with her mother during a large celebration, where she encountered a young samurai with whom she immediately fell in love. Losing sight of him in the crowd, she commissioned a furisode like the one he was wearing, hoping it would catch his attention if they ever crossed paths again.

However, despite wearing it many times, they never met again, and Azabu, desperate at the futility of her prayers, fell ill and died. At her funeral, her grieving parents draped her coffin with the garment, which, as was customary, was donated to the temple along with her other personal belongings. A monk later sold the kimono to another young woman, Kino, who, upon wearing it on her sixteenth birthday, began having visions of the samurai and eventually died of a broken heart. The tragedy repeated once more with a third unfortunate girl, Iku.

The monks decided to end this curse by burning the furisode in the temple’s garden. However, as they lit the fire and began reciting prayers, a sudden and strong wind carried the kimono away, dropping it onto the temple’s wooden roof, setting it ablaze. Shortly after, the same wind spread the flames across the city, triggering the catastrophe. British Orientalist Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, who became a Japanese citizen in 1890 under the name Yakumo Koizumi, recorded this story in his work Kwaidan and Other Fantastic Legends and Tales of Japan, although it also appears in other sources, such as the Kibun-Daijin, where the protagonist is named O-Samé, among other differences.

Japan Fire Edo Tokio Yakuza
General view of Edo painted on folding panels in the 17th century. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The fire occurred on January 18, 1657, although Lafcadio places it on the eighteenth day of the first month of the first year of Meireki, meaning 1655. In any case, there is no doubt that it devastated Edo, the city now known as Tokyo, which was renamed in 1868 during the Meiji Revolution. At the time, the imperial palace was in Kyoto, the official capital, but the seat of the bakufu (government), meaning the shōgun’s administration, was in Edo, along with the main administrative offices. Thus, it was the de facto capital, the political center, the country’s main transportation hub, and its economic powerhouse.

Edo’s importance was such that between 1640 and 1690, its population doubled to eight hundred thousand people, who lived crammed into wood-and-paper houses with thatched roofs, packed together in narrow streets. Since Japan was frequently hit by cold, dry Siberian winds, many people had to keep their fireplaces burning all day, increasing the risk of fire—especially considering that they lit their homes with oil lamps. This is why two-thirds of the fires that struck the city throughout its history occurred in winter, between January and February, whereas in other places, fires were more common in summer.

There are records of forty-nine major fires between 1601 and 1868, and that’s only counting the largest ones. Only castles, upper-class residences, and some government buildings incorporated stone and/or tiled roofs. In contrast, Osaka, where stone construction was more common, suffered only six major fires in the same period. It is hard not to compare it to the Great Fire of London in September 1666, which was similar in terms of destruction (although with far fewer casualties). “Fires and fights are the flowers of Edo,” said a poetic proverb, illustrating how common they were. The hikeshi (firefighters) simply couldn’t keep up.

Japan Fire Edo Tokio Yakuza
A hikeshi (firefighter) with his makoi or corporate banner, by artist Utagawa Yoshitora. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The hikeshi were the firefighters of the era, heirs to the Daimyo Bikeshi, private fire brigades that the daimyos (feudal lords) began organizing for their security in response to the common threat. Created about thirty years earlier, their organization was still in its early stages, and their interventions mainly consisted of removing thatched roofs before the flames could consume them (in Osaka, they often demolished entire buildings to create firebreaks); the use of water was rare, as pumps were not implemented until the 18th century and, even then, were largely ignored due to their low pressure and the difficulty of handling bamboo hoses.

Returning to the origin of the fire, the legend of the furisode is not impossible; however, historians have established that everything began in the Hongō district (where the University of Tokyo stands today) and spread southward across the city due to hurricane-force winds blowing from the northwestern sea. This was worsened by the fact that the wood and roofing of buildings were particularly dry due to a drought that had afflicted Japan during the summer. As mentioned, the hikeshi still lacked manpower, equipment, and experience to tackle such chaos and found themselves powerless.

The flames leaped from house to house, street to street, and district to district, reaching Kanda and Kyobashi. They jumped from one bank of the Sumida River to the other, igniting the Reiganji Temple—an enormous religious complex, the largest in the Koto area, southeast of the city—and causing a stampede of people who became trapped on the Asakusabashi Bridge. Some twenty thousand perished nearby, unable to pass, as that route led to the Chiyoda Castle grounds—the shogun’s residence—which had its gates closed.

Japan Fire Edo Tokio Yakuza
View of the imperial castle walls today. Credit: Pierre Blaché / Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons / Flickr

On the second night, as the wind changed direction, the fire began to consume the city center, reducing much of the administrative buildings in the Kōjimachi district to ashes and threatening Chiyoda Castle itself. Built in 1457, it was a vast military complex whose central fortress had the tallest tower in the region (fifty-eight and a half meters). The base was spared because it was made of stone, but the rest was not. Nevertheless, the worst damage befell the other buildings, used for services and housing for servants, which were completely consumed. By the third day, the disaster had ravaged the Kojimachi area and reached the Shimbashi district.

There was no respite until the end of the day when the wind died down and the fire diminished simply because there was little left to burn; nearly three-quarters of Edo no longer existed. However, the embers continued to produce a dense, black smoke that covered the cityscape, making breathing difficult and hindering both the rescue of the injured and the retrieval of bodies. It took three more days before teams of volunteers and monks could transport the charred bodies via the Sumida River to nearby Honjō, a suburban community where they were buried.

Currently, a Buddhist temple stands there, where the Banninzuka (Mound of a Million Souls) and the Ekō-in (Hall of Prayer for the Dead) were established by order of Shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna. He sent nine hundred tons of rice and sixteen thousand kobans (the koban was a gold coin, originally called ryō) to be distributed, fearing an economic collapse. As his daimyō, Hoshina Masayuki, stated: ”The shogunate’s savings are meant to be used in times like these to calm the people. If we do not use them now, it is as if we have no savings at all.” The material losses were indeed severe. More than sixty percent of the city burned down, including half a thousand palaces and three hundred and fifty temples and shrines.

Japan Fire Edo Tokio Yakuza
Woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshitsuna, depicting Edo’s civilian fire brigades. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The reconstruction of Edo took two years. The shogun ensured that Matsudaira Nobutsuna, the rōjū (“Elder,” a high-ranking government official) responsible for overseeing the work, did so with wide streets, houses spaced further apart, and tiled roofs. Special attention was given to restoring the commercial district as quickly as possible, relocating temples and shrines to the riverbank, draining swampy areas to create more land, structuring the city in successive rings, and moving auxiliary buildings away from the castle—including the daimyōs’ residences—surrounding them with moats and open spaces to allow the hikeshi to respond quickly.

The hikeshi were also reinforced, leading to the establishment of what is considered the world’s first permanent fire brigade, composed of specialists in various functions. Their influence extended to neighboring towns like Ueno and Asakusa. Teams were assigned to each district, patrolling regularly alongside volunteer groups, ultimately becoming the backbone of their communities. This positive social role had an unusual downside, as it became linked to the origins of the yakuza gangs (Japan’s equivalent of the mafia, which emerged precisely in the 17th century).

Some personal stories remained in the aftermath—some tragic, some horrifying, all remarkable. For instance, the Confucian scholar Harashi Rayama did not perish in the fire but from grief upon seeing his home and library reduced to ashes. Or the case of the hundreds of prisoners who, seeing the flames consuming some of their fellow inmates in their cells, were allowed to leave under the promise of returning afterward (and all of them did). Many deaths occurred because residents tried to escape with the traditional wheeled chests loaded with their furniture and belongings, only to be caught by the flames in massive traffic jams. The Kanda River was choked with bodies, and the thousands of prostitutes from Yoshiwara’s Red-Light District were sadly resettled in Asakusa.

Japan Fire Edo Tokio Yakuza
Memorial to the Great Meireki Fire at Honmyō-ji in Toshima Ward, Tokyo. Credit: 椿玄 / Wikimedia Commons

In this regard, various hypotheses have been proposed about how the devastation began. The most famous is the legend of the furisode, but there were others. Even in its time, the tale was questioned by Asai Ryōi, a Buddhist monk and leading figure in Kana-zōshi (popular literature), who dismissed it as mere fiction.

One rumor suggested that the initial spark occurred at the residence of daimyō Abe Tadaaki, a man of great moral integrity and scourge of the corrupt. The government might have blamed him precisely for that reason, fearing he would act against them. There is no evidence to support this claim, but suspicions about the shogunate led to another theory.

According to this second theory, the bakufu had an urban redevelopment plan to address Edo’s rapid population growth, which brought problems such as overcrowding, disease outbreaks, rising crime, and, paradoxically, a high risk of fires. The issue was that implementing the plan was nearly impossible due to the need for mass expropriations—some from powerful noble families—and prolonged legal battles. It was therefore speculated that a deliberate disaster was orchestrated to facilitate the changes. Similar to what was said about Nero’s Rome, this is highly unlikely, given that Chiyoda Castle itself was also severely affected.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on February 4, 2025: El gran incendio que destruyó 500 palacios, 350 templos y casi toda la capital de Japón en 1657, y dio origen a la Yakuza

SOURCES

George Sansom, History of Japan, 1615-1867

Iokibe Makoto, The Era of great disasters. Japan and its three major earthquakes

Feuyo Matnuna, Fires and recoveries witnessed by the Dutch in Edo and Nagasaki: The Great Fire of Meireki in 1657 and the Great Fire of Kanbun in 1663

Jordan Sand, Steven Wills, Governance, arson, and firefighting in Edo, 1600–1868

George Lloyd, How the Great Fire of 1657 shaped modern Tokyo

Wikipedia, Gran incendio de Meireki

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