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Shitamachi Museum
The is a museum in Ueno, Tokyo, Ueno, Taito, Tokyo, Japan. Located on the shores of Shinobazu Pond within Ueno Park, it is dedicated to the traditional culture of Tokyo's Shitamachi. The museum opened in 1980, six years before the Fukagawa Edo Museum and thirteen years before the Edo-Tokyo Museum, all part of a national trend for building local history museums. All three were primarily designed by Total Media.Sand, Jordan, ''Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects'', University of California Press, 2013, , p. 120 Historical background ''Shitamachi'', literally 'Low City', is the unofficial name for the Tokyo flatlands, the area of Tokyo going from Taitō to Chiyoda and Chuō. It is the physically low part of the city just east of the Sumida River. It was inhabited by Edo's lower classes, including craftsmen, fishermen, sailors and merchants. The area produced most of what was original in Edo's culture and was the entertainment and shopping center of the ...
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Fukagawa Edo Museum
The Fukagawa Edo Museum is a museum of old Edo in the former Fukagawa ward (now Kōtō ward) of Tokyo, Japan. It consists of a large, covered, life-size replica of a Tokyo shitamachi neighborhood from around 1840, near the end of the Tokugawa period. It includes 11 buildings: houses, shops, a theater, a boathouse, a tavern, and a fire tower, all built using traditional techniques. Visitors can walk down the streets and enter the shops and houses. The lighting varies over time, to reproduce different times of day. The museum opened in 1986, six years after the Shitamachi Museum and seven years before the Edo-Tokyo Museum, all part of a national trend for building local history museums. The exhibits for all three were primarily designed by Total Media.Jordan Sand Jordan Sand is an American Japanologist. He is a professor of Japanese history and culture at Georgetown University with a focus on the architectural and cultural history of Japan. Biography Sand received his B.A. and ...
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Buildings And Structures In Taitō
A building, or edifice, is an enclosed structure with a roof and walls standing more or less permanently in one place, such as a house or factory (although there's also portable buildings). Buildings come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and functions, and have been adapted throughout history for a wide number of factors, from building materials available, to weather conditions, land prices, ground conditions, specific uses, prestige, and aesthetic reasons. To better understand the term ''building'' compare the list of nonbuilding structures. Buildings serve several societal needs – primarily as shelter from weather, security, living space, privacy, to store belongings, and to comfortably live and work. A building as a shelter represents a physical division of the human habitat (a place of comfort and safety) and the ''outside'' (a place that at times may be harsh and harmful). Ever since the first cave paintings, buildings have also become objects or canvasses of much artist ...
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Museums In Tokyo
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these items available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. The largest museums are located in major cities throughout the world, while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas. Museums have varying aims, ranging from the conservation and documentation of their collection, serving researchers and specialists, to catering to the general public. The goal of serving researchers is not only scientific, but intended to serve the general public. There are many types of museums, including art museums, natural history museums, science museums, war museums, and children's museums. According to the International Council of Museums (ICOM), there are more than 55,000 museums in 202 ...
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History Museums In Japan
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries. History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the ...
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Sentō
is a type of Japanese communal bathhouse where customers pay for entrance. Traditionally these bathhouses have been quite utilitarian, with a tall barrier separating the sexes within one large room, a minimum of lined-up faucets on both sides, and a single large bath for the already washed bathers to sit in among others. Since the second half of the 20th century, these communal bathhouses have been decreasing in numbers as more and more Japanese residences now have baths. Some Japanese find social importance in going to public baths, out of the theory that physical proximity/intimacy brings emotional intimacy, which is termed '' skinship'' in pseudo-English Japanese. Others go to a ''sentō'' because they live in a small housing facility without a private bath or to enjoy bathing in a spacious room and to relax in saunas or jet baths that often accompany new or renovated sentōs. Another type of Japanese public bath is ''onsen'', which uses hot water from a natural hot sprin ...
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Coppersmith
A coppersmith, also known as a brazier, is a person who makes artifacts from copper and brass. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. The term "redsmith" is used for a tinsmith that uses tinsmithing tools and techniques to make copper items. History Anthropologists believe copper to be the first metal used by humans due to its softness and ease of manipulation. In antiquity, copper's durability and resistance to rust or corrosion proved valuable. Copper's relationship with man is thought to date back over six thousand years. Coppersmith is one of the few trades that have a mention in the Bible. Copper was particularly worked in England, with ores smelted in Wales as early as the 1500s. Copper was found in great quantities in North America, especially Montana, as well as archaic copper mines near Lake Superior, which was recorded by a Jesuit missionary in 1659. Coppersmithing as a trade benefited strongly from the invention of sheet metal rollers. Copper sheet was then availa ...
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Pulled Rickshaw
A pulled rickshaw (from Japanese ) is a mode of human-powered transport by which a runner draws a two-wheeled cart which seats one or two people. In recent times the use of human-powered rickshaws has been discouraged or outlawed in many countries due to concern for the welfare of rickshaw workers. Pulled rickshaws have been replaced mainly by cycle rickshaw and auto rickshaws. Overview Rickshaws are commonly believed to have been invented in Japan in the 1860s, at the beginning of a rapid period of technical advancement. In the 19th century, rickshaw pulling became an inexpensive, popular mode of transportation across Asia. Peasants who migrated to large Asian cities often worked first as a rickshaw runner. It was "the deadliest occupation in the East, ndthe most degrading for human beings to pursue." The rickshaw's popularity in Japan declined by the 1930s with the advent of automated forms of transportation, like automobiles and trains. In China, the rickshaw's populari ...
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Geta (footwear)
A Geta, ( zh, 木屐, ja, 下駄; geta or getas) is a traditional East Asian footwear that resembles flip-flops. A kind of sandals, geta have a flat wooden base elevated with up to three (though commonly two) "teeth", held on the foot with a fabric thong, which keeps the foot raised above the ground. History The earliest known pair of geta was excavated in a neolithic archaeological site near Ningbo, Zhejing, China, dated to the Liangzhu culture (3400–2250 BCE). These geta differed in construction to modern geta, having five or six holes in place of the modern-day three. The use and popularity of wooden clogs in China has been recorded in other sources dating to between the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE) to the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han dynasties (202 BCE–220 CE). Geta-style shoes were worn in Southern China likely until sometime between the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1636/1644–1912), when they were replaced by other types of footwea ...
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Asakusa
is a district in Taitō, Tokyo, Japan. It is known as the location of the Sensō-ji, a Buddhist temple dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon. There are several other temples in Asakusa, as well as various festivals, such as the . History The development of Asakusa as an entertainment district during the Edo period came about in part because of the neighboring district, Kuramae. Kuramae was a district of storehouses for rice, which was then used as payment for servants of the feudal government. The keepers () of these storage houses initially stored the rice for a small fee, but over the years began exchanging the rice for money or selling it to local shopkeepers at a margin. Through such trading, many came to have a considerable amount of disposable income and as result theaters and geisha houses began to spring up in nearby Asakusa. For most of the 20th century, Asakusa remained a major entertainment district in Tokyo. The or "Sixth District" was in particular famous a ...
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Sumida River
The is a river that flows through central Tokyo, Japan. It branches from the Arakawa River at Iwabuchi (in Kita-ku) and flows into Tokyo Bay. Its tributaries include the Kanda and Shakujii rivers. It passes through the Kita, Adachi, Arakawa, Sumida, Taito, Kōtō and Chūō wards of Tokyo. What is now known as the "Sumida River" was previously the path of the Ara-kawa. Toward the end of the Meiji era, the Ara-kawa was manually diverted to prevent flooding, as the Imperial Palace in Chiyoda is nearby. Art Sumida Gawa pottery was named after the Sumida River and was originally manufactured in the Asakusa district near Tokyo by potter Inoue Ryosai I and his son Inoue Ryosai II. In the late 1890s, Ryosai I developed a style of applied figures on a surface with flowing glaze, based on Chinese glazes called "flambe." Sumida pieces could be teapots, ash trays, or vases, and were made for export to the West. Inoue Ryosai III, grandson of Ryosai I, moved the manufacturing sit ...
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