Focusing on the years after the Russo-Japanese war, and on the years after the 1923 earthquake, Alisa Freedman, drawing on a variety of sources that have thusfar been more or less ignored, elucidates, in Tokyo in Transit, the importance that "rails and road" have played in the development of the Japanese capital, and also of the modern denizens of that metropolis. That new and expanded transportation modes and networks are inextricably related with modernity is a commonplace, but it's nice to learn how that has played out in the Japanese context.