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Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum

by John McGee

A Toden streetcar which ran between Shimbashi and Shibuya from 1962-67 
(Photos: John McGee)

Studio Ghibli's animated film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) was popular in part because it evoked a mythical Japan, a place familiar yet ancient and timeless. For inspiration, the film's director, Hayao Miyazaki, visited the Edo-Tokyo Tatemono-en (Open Air Architectural Museum) in western Tokyo's Koganei Park. He found magic in its snippets of the city's built history, from 200-year-old farmhouses to a 1960s streetcar. 

The 20th century was hard on Tokyo. The Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, WWII firebombings, and nonstop development since the '60s have destroyed much of the city's architectural heritage. To save something of its past, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government established the Tatemono-en as a branch of its Ryogoku-based Edo-Tokyo Museum in 1993.

The museum's 27 buildings (with plans for four more) run along small streets in architectural timelines from the mid-Edo period through mid-Showa.

This late Edo-period farmhouse, owned by the well-to-do Yoshino Family,
stood in Nozaki, Mitaka until 1963

One of the oldest is the Tsunashima family's thatched-roof farmhouse. Built around 1742, it passed through ten generations before being retired. As in the other two farmhouses around Tama Road, tatami floors rise a couple of feet above a dirt entry. A small fire in the open hearth (cut into the tatami) provides a gathering spot for visiting oba-san (older women) and elderly volunteers to get natsukashii. Its spiraling smoke protects the building's wood structure against insects and adds a whiff of authenticity. And you think your furo (bath) is primitive? How about crouching over a shallow wooden bucket on a raised bamboo slat floor in the winter?

You're better off at the sento (public bath), at the end of the shitamachi main street on the other side of the museum. To the left of the 1929 bathhouse (with a requisite Mount Fuji interior) is an Edo-period bar; to the right, an early Meiji tailor's shop. Several of the other shops are in the 1920s kanban (signboard) style. The facades of both a flower and stationery store are in ceramic tile, the blended Japanese-Western exteriors of a house and a kitchenware shop in verdigris copper shingles. 

More mixing of East and West appears in modern designs from the 1920s-40s along Yamanote Dori, the museum's middle section. A 1925 house from the then new development of Denenchofu could be a California bungalow with its clapboard siding, mullioned windows and pergola. The Japanese tile roof, however, gives it away. In his 1942 home, architect Kunio Mayekawa used wartime restrictions on building materials to his advantage. The chalet-style building with a glass wall and open interior looks ready for a Wallpaper* magazine photo shoot. 

Maruni Shoten, a kitchenware store 
built in Kanda-Jimbocho in 1926, 
stocked everything from stepstools 
to tawashi 

Though the buildings were moved from their original locations and reconstructed here, the exteriors were little changed. The interiors were often recreated in a mix of styles, reflecting their cross-generational usage. A 1933 soy sauce and liquor shop, for example, has old wooden barrels but also fluorescent lights that illuminate a Ken Takakura Sapporo beer poster. 

Small architectural details dot the grounds—an old post box, the top of the watchtower from the Ueno Fire Station, and bricks from Ginza "Brick Town."

This Japanese version of Warner Brothers' back lot satisfies in a relaxing-on-the-tatami kind of way. It's only unfortunate that Tokyo doesn't do more to keep its architectural heritage in its streets rather than leaving it to be reconstructed in museums, films and, in the notorious case of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, in Aichi Prefecture.

The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum (Tatemono-en) is in Koganei Park, 3-7-1 Sakura-cho, Koganei City, Tokyo, Japan. Tel: 042-388-3300. Nearest stn: Musashi Koganei on the JR Chuo line.

©2007 John McGee

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