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Fukagawa Edo Museum
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Address: 1-3-28 Shirakawa, Koto-ku
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If you want to make a journey through time visit Fukagawa
Edo Museum, situated on a pleasant green street called Fukagawa
Shiryokan Dori, opposite the north entrance to Kiyosumi Park.
Fukagawa Edo Museum has only one exhibition but it is just wonderful.
A nineteenth-century riverside district in Edo, the original
Tokyo, has been carefully recreated in the museum. The area
on the east bank of the Sumida River called Fukagawa prospered
from around the mid-18th century up to the beginning of the
20th century. A life-sized reconstruction reminds of detailed
decorations made for some big budget historical movie. Eleven
traditional Japanese houses, shops, inns and tenement homes
were faithfully reconstructed out of wood according to the methods
and techniques of those days. Shops and warehouses represent
the traditional Japanese trades: there is a greengrocery, oil
wholesaler's shop and a number of buildings related to the storage,
preparation and selling of rice. There is even a canal with
a traditional boat.
While at that time the majority of the buildings were made from
wood there was always a danger that a fire would break out.
For this reason, a fire watchtower was an indispensable part
of any town landscape. This one is no exception. Next to the
canal a huge watchtower rises.
Visitors can remove their shoes and enter any house, which have
all the furnishing of that time. Moreover, they could open drawers,
pick up and examine any things they would be interested in.
The floors of traditional Japanese building are covered with
straw matting, tatami. A tatami mat is usually rectangular,
although there are also triangular, square and even octagonal.
The standard size of tatami is 1.7 square meters. Even nowadays,
a great number of modern houses and apartments have at least
one tatami style room. In Japan, the size of a room is usually
measured not in square meters but by the number of tatami mats
it would take to cover the floor. Today, an average room in
a typical house or apartment is about six to eight mats.
A walk around the museum allows visitors to experience a whole
day in the life of ordinary people from the Edo period. With
the help of the state-of-the-art sound and lightning equipment
morning, noon and night are recreated very realistically.
There are a lot of small details to make the scene seem real
and believable - a cat sunning on the roof, a snail crawling
up a fence, sounds of birds, dog barking and so on.
Don't confuse this museum with a larger Edo-Tokyo Museum, which
is devoted to the history of Tokyo from the early 17th up to
the 20th centuries.
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