Edo-Tokyo Museum

The other weekend we went out with some friends to Ryogoku and the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Edo is the old name for Tokyo. Most of the museum contained huge reconstructions of Edo era buildings and scale models of the town. From the outside the museum looks like it's hollow.

It's a very impressive looking building on large stilts. It's meant to be a reconstruction of a raised warehouse structure.

This looks like a woodworker's shop. The scenes were very interesting although you couldn't go inside them like you could at the Shitamachi museum in Ueno.

Here is one of the very detailed dioramas. It's so detailed that you can't really see anything in it except a bunch of people.

This one is a little less busy.

Old Japanese phone booths were called white boxes. They look very cool, but so do blue, Tardis-like phone booths.

Alice tries the jinriksha. After the museum we went to a small, secluded garden. It was like the ideal version of a Japanese garden.

Ryogoku is the home of many sumo stables, where young sumoka train to one day fight in the many sumo tournaments each year. Sumo is the national sport of Japan, and it's very entertaining to watch even if you don't know what's going on.

Here we all are at the main sumo stadium. We arrived about ten minutes before closing time, just fast enough to take a look at the small sumo museum.

This was the most interesting photo I saw there. A sumoka playing baseball. I'm sure they do other normal things, it's just hard to visualise those things.

We also visited this temple which doesn't look like a temple. They had a pet cemetary on the side and a lot of cats hanging about. Temples often kept cats to keep the mice from nibbling on the scrolls. These days they are probably kept just to amuse the monks.

We also went to an izakaya, which is like a Japanese pub, the big difference is that they serve a variety of food to snack on as you drink. They have these places in Korea too, it's such a good idea, I wish they had a few in Sydney. It's far less boring to eat and drink, you can drink more, and the food is usually very good yet not everyday fare. I remember eating chicken hearts and lungs on a stick in Korea, here they had tamer options. We ordered a mini pizza, a chees plate, some sultanas, a sausage plate and finally some ice cream for dessert. While there is a lot of food, it's still a pub and drinking is the main idea. We drank beer and I tried some weird Japanese drinks. I can't really remember what they were, strangely enough.