Time travel to the Taisho era!? ~Taito City Shitamachi Museum~

Have you heard of the Shitamachi Museum? Here you can see a life-size reproduction of the downtown area of ​​Tokyo during the Taisho era. If you come here, you can experience life in the past that is hard to imagine today. You'll feel like you've traveled back in time!

A reproduction of a tenement house from the downtown area of ​​Tokyo during the Taisho era!

The Shitamachi Museum, located on the banks of Shinobazu Pond, opened on October 1, 1980, to convey to the present day the lifestyle of Tokyo's downtown area from the Taisho era through to the 1950s. On the first floor, there are life-size reproductions of the tenement houses and merchant houses of Tokyo's downtown area during the Taisho era. I visited on a weekday morning, but the museum was bustling with tourists from various countries

This is a candy store located in a row house that stretches across the first floor. The storefront is lined with sweets and toys that will bring back memories for those who grew up in the 1950s. On the right side of the photo, you can see bottled ramune soda in a wooden pail. You can see that this was a candy store back when there were no commercial refrigerators to keep the juice cool

There was a well outside the tenement house that was pumped up with a hand pump, so they probably filled wooden buckets with well water to cool the Ramune. In the days before refrigerators, it was common to cool watermelon and juice with well water. Because well water is groundwater, it was much colder than tap water

The room next to the candy store is the craftsman's home. The area to the right, which can also be seen as the kitchen, is the workshop, and the four members of the family sleep and wake up in the tatami-floored room in front. There are no other rooms. When it's time to sleep, they move the things that are in the middle of the room to the corner and lay down their futons

Inari shrines were a common sight in the tenement houses of the downtown area. During the Edo period, they were said to be enshrined in every house and tenement as the guardian deity of the land. By the way, on the table on the right side of the picture are an "omikuji shelf" and a "omikuji tube." What's great is that you can actually draw from the omikuji on display

Pick up the "fortune tube" next to the shelf, shake it, and take out the "fortune stick." Open the shelf with the number corresponding to the number written on it. There you will find the fortune slip inside. Of course, you can take it home with you

Check out these retro items that are no longer available!

If you go up to the exhibition room on the second floor, you will see old-fashioned toys lined up in the showcases. There are also wooden toys that you can actually touch and play with. The second floor displays materials about life in the downtown area and seasonal life. During the summer, the exhibition featured summer life under the theme "Summer in the Downtown Area: Food, Clothing, Shelter and Play." Now, let's take a look around the exhibits on the second floor

Nowadays, it's common for refrigerators to use electricity, but up until the 1950s, refrigerators didn't use electricity, but instead used ice to cool things. Large ice cubes were placed on the top shelf, and the cold air from that cooled the food stored on the lower shelf. The inside was lined with tin, and cork was used as insulation. When the ice melted, water would come out, but the system was designed to properly drain this water outside. Ice was delivered almost daily by an ice shop, which was always located in every neighborhood

Until the mid-1960s, it was common to hang a mosquito net and sleep under it. At the time, people would use mosquito coils to repel mosquitoes, but the fire would go out halfway through, and they couldn't be used for very long. Therefore, mosquito nets made of fine fibers that mosquitoes couldn't get in were a summer necessity. Later, perhaps because electric products that could repel mosquitoes all day came on the market, mosquito nets gradually fell out of use

On the left side of the image is a gramophone, and on the right is a stereo player. Both are used to listen to records. The gramophone uses electricity generated by turning a handle to turn the record and play the sound. The stereo player uses electricity, just like today. Incidentally, stereo players were quite a luxury item, and up until the mid-1960s, most households had small record players

At the very back of the exhibition room on the second floor is a home from the 1960s in downtown Tokyo. It's a completely different world from the life in a Taisho-era tenement house in the exhibition room on the first floor. There is a radio on a shelf to the right, and a black-and-white television in the middle of the room. If you look closely, you'll also see an electric fan and a black telephone to the right of the television. Televisions began to spread to downtown Tokyo in the wake of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 (Showa 39). Incidentally, color televisions didn't start to appear in homes until around 1968 (Showa 43)

What did you think?

The first floor displays the life of the downtown area during the Taisho period, which still retains the atmosphere of the Edo period, while the second floor recreates the life of the downtown area from the Taisho period to the 1960s. The exhibits allow you to clearly see how life changed over time. Looking back at life in the present day, why not experience an everyday life that is hard to imagine at the Shitamachi Museum?

INFORMATION

Jun Nambara

Author, scriptwriter, and animation producer. He wrote and directed the drama CD "The Rose of Versailles" supervised by Riyoko Ikeda, and has published many books, including "Onmyoji Abe no Seimei" (Futami Shobo). He is also attracting attention as a travel writer who works as a tour conductor on weekends. His hobby is pilgrimages to sacred sites of anime, dramas, and movies