The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide up Tokyo in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred or even three hundred years before.

In Tokyo Jinnai presents a detailed picture of how people lived in the seventeenth-century metropolis of Edo (renamed Tokyo during the Meiji Restoration in 1868). He leads his readers through the streets of the city, tracing the physical, architectural changes that took place over subsequent centuries as the people of Tokyo adapted to new technologies while attempting to preserve what they valued of their old living patterns.