Edo-Tokyo Museum

Tokyo, Japan (Jun 26, 2012)

After the Kiyosumi Garden we had an excellent lunch in a sushi restaurant that Yumiko and John knew about. The neighborhood around the gardens is quite nice, with plenty of shops of all sorts where you can enter and look around without any over-eager clerk trying to sell you anything. After lunch we headed to the Tokyo-Edo Museum. The museum is an interesting concept: it hosts a life-size reconstruction of a Tokyo housing block inside a large concrete warehouse. You can actually enter the wooden buildings and look at the carefully reconstructed furniture, or even interact with it (as Daise is doing in the small photo on the left). And you really don't have the choice of skipping anything: we found a volunteer museum guide that made absolutely sure we tried and photographically documented everything in the museum. She took personally at heart that we entered in every building, snapped the obligatory photos of each of us doing the kind of things we could have done if we had lived in Edo, and finally quizzed us about the lecture she delivered! After the museum we had one more stroll in the neighborhood, visiting more shops, in particular an interesting place where we tasted many types of excellent sake). We finally ended up into a large temple where some very carefully choreographed and quite loud religious ceremony involving drums and gongs was ongoing, while Mayli and Yimuko had an interesting discussion about the naming of colors, blue in particular. We ended the day with dinner, in the Tokyo equivalent of a tapa-bar. This was a cool place where we shared beer with tempura and seafood skewers and, best of all, skewers with eel liver (unagi kimo): really tasty, pity that Mayli didn't dare to try it!