The Fukagawa Edo Museum is a museum of old Edo in the former Fukagawa ward (now Kōtō ward) of

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. It consists of a large, covered, life-size replica of a Tokyo

shitamachi and are traditional names for two areas of Tokyo, Japan. Yamanote refers to the affluent, upper-class areas of Tokyo west of the Imperial Palace.Iwanami Japanese dictionary, 6th Edition (2008), DVD version While citizens once considered it as ...

neighborhood from around 1840, near the end of the

Tokugawa period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional ''daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characterize ...

. It includes 11 buildings: houses, shops, a theater, a boathouse, a tavern, and a fire tower, all built using traditional techniques. Visitors can walk down the streets and enter the shops and houses. The lighting varies over time, to reproduce different times of day. The museum opened in 1986, six years after the

Shitamachi Museum The is a museum in Ueno, Taito, Tokyo, Japan. Located on the shores of Shinobazu Pond within Ueno Park, it is dedicated to the traditional culture of Tokyo's Shitamachi. The museum opened in 1980, six years before the Fukagawa Edo Museum and t ...

and seven years before the

Edo-Tokyo Museum The is a historical museum located at 1-4-1 Yokoami, Sumida, Tokyo, Sumida-Ku, Tokyo in the Ryōgoku, Ryogoku district. The museum opened in March 1993 to preserve Edo's cultural heritage, and features city models of Edo and Tokyo between 1 ...

, all part of a national trend for building local history museums. The exhibits for all three were primarily designed by Total Media.

Jordan Sand Jordan Sand is an American Japanologist. He is a professor of Japanese history and culture at Georgetown University with a focus on the architectural and cultural history of Japan. Biography Sand received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia Universi ...

, Jordan, ''Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects'', University of California Press, 2013, , p. 120

External links

Official site

Notes

{{Coord, 35.68103, 139.80057, format=dms, type:landmark_region:JP, display=title History museums in Japan Museums in Tokyo Buildings and structures in Koto, Tokyo Vernacular architecture in Japan Museums established in 1986 1986 establishments in Japan