Tokyo Edo Museum

While we were in Tokyo recently we visited the Tokyo Edo Museum which is in Ryogoku (also famous for sumo wrestling). It was in a huge building, inside of which they'd reconstructed part of the Nihon-bashi (main bridge in old tokyo) for people to walk over the display floors. The museum focuses on the Edo period in Tokyo, but has displays for more modern periods too. The most impressive thing I saw was a mechanical doll that could write a few things in Japanese or English! The designer programmed in a few letters and characters, each of which could be selected by shifting some gears. Then all the operator has to do is put a new sheet of paper in the frame in front of it, and pull the wind-up cord. The body and head are also articulated so that it looks satisfied after doing the writing! There was also a mechanical doll archer that could notch, draw, and fire 5 arrows at a target in succession, though I missed that demonstration. These displays were sponsored by Toshiba, which at first I thought was a little too "commercial" for a government museum, but in actual fact, a lot of these historical pieces were invented by the founder of the company that later became Toshiba.

Of course there were lots of interesting things like weapons (my favourite being the sword with a gun attached and hidden in the scabbard), but I was also fascinated with the displays on life in early Tokyo. These included replicas of the first popular bookstores selling fiction and wood-block prints, as well as Kabuki theatre which used quite a few lighting and mechanical effects (like wires, traptoors, rotating stages) to impress the audience.

These photos aren't the greatest quality, but they're not bad given I took them with my phone!