The Edo period writer Santo Kyoden (1761-1816), who depicted the pleasure quarters and popular customs of the day, made reference to Edokko in the 1787 Tsugen somagaki ("A Dilettante's Report on the Top Brothels"), one of the genre known as sharebon ("witty books") that portrayed life in the pleasure quarters. As Kyoden wrote in this book, Edo denizens had a superiority complex born of living in close proximity to, and drinking the same water as, the shogun. Kyoden portrayed the trueborn Tokyoite as someone who lived in the Nihonbashi district and who never let the sun rise on his earnings.

So has this character known as the Edokko been around since the time of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), the warrior chieftain who established the Tokugawa shogunate and chose Edo as its headquarters? Edokko were not yet around in the early part of the eighteenth century. In 1590, when Ieyasu began constructing the new castle town, he gathered merchants and craftsmen from places including Mikawa and Suruga, which he ruled; Kyoto, Japan's capital at the time; and Osaka, the nation's commercial hub. The merchants and artisans who came to Edo did not refer to themselves as Edokko. Most of them merely viewed themselves as being on temporary assignment or business travel to their branch locations in Edo. On an everyday basis, they spoke their provincial dialects and made little effort to familiarize themselves with the culture or customs of Edo, which was not yet the capital.

However, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the merchants and craftsmen who had taken up residence in the new capital came to form a composite picture of the classic Edo denizen. The characters who made up the picture included the merchants along the riverbanks; the craftsmen and merchants of Nihonbashi; the moneylenders of the Kuramae district in Asakusa; and the masters of shops in Shinkawa, Reiganjima, and the lumberyard district of Kiba. These people were the Edokko who emerged in the late 1700s. People like them formed the distribution mechanism via which money and goods flowed into Edo under the revenue-increasing economic policies of Tanuma Okitsugu (1720-1788), a high official in the Tokugawa government. The new capital's economy, heretofore dominated by the economies of Kyoto, Osaka, and vicinity, was at last producing its own wealthy merchants, born and bred in Edo. These large merchants, blessed with financial freedom, had no need to boast or put on airs. Warriors and merchants mixed freely without regard to social station and expressed their style and connoisseurship in woodblock prints and the novelettes about the pleasure quarters known as sharebon. They established a unique Edo culture, distinguished not least by the steady, year-round whirl of festivals and temple and shrine visits. But after Tanuma fell out of power, the culture and creativity sparked by his energy were reined in by the belt-tightening reform policies of his successor, Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1829), who favored getting back to the basics of samurai government. The lively culture that had produced and then come to be defined by the Edokko went on the decline.

Starting in the late eighteenth century, the desolation of farming villages intensified, and an influx of farmers into the capital fueled a sharp increase in the ranks of Edo's lower classes. Some of these newcomers blended adeptly into Edo society and passed themselves off as Edokko, eventually far outnumbering the established residents who looked down their noses at the arrivistes.

This trend disrupted the social order of born-and-bred city dwellers and engendered feelings of anxiety, but rather than wreak havoc, the new arrivals adopted the Edokko attitude.

By the end of Japan's feudal era, large numbers of people were referring to themselves as Edokko, and a definition of Edokko was spelled out. A true Edokko was defined as a child of two Edo-born parents. A person with one Edo-born parent was said to be madara ("speckled" or "striped"), and someone whose parents were both born outside Edo was an inakakko ("country child"). Under that definition, true Edokko were said to account for only 1 in 10 Edo residents.