Edo-Tokyo Museum

The permanent exhibition is a walk through roughly four hundred years, from Tokugawa Ieyasu arriving in 1590 at a castle town of no particular importance, to the Edo of a million people, to the Meiji rebuild, the 1923 earthquake, the firebombing and the post-war city. It is chronological, it is physical, and it is built at a scale that photographs badly and works extremely well in person.

The centrepiece is a full-size reconstruction of the northern half of Nihonbashi bridge, which you walk across to enter the Edo section. Beyond it are reconstructed tenement rows, a kabuki theatre frontage, and a series of enormous and obsessively detailed scale models of streets, fire towers and daimyo residences. The renovation added large-scale screens and a smartphone audio guide in thirteen languages.

The thing that makes it work is that it takes ordinary life seriously. There is as much space given to how a row house was heated, what a fire brigade did, and what a bookshop sold as there is to shoguns. If you only visit one museum in Tokyo and you want to understand the city rather than look at objects, this is the one.

Kiyonori Kikutake’s 1993 building is raised on four legs to the height of Edo Castle, and it is often described as looking like a spacecraft parked in Ryogoku. It is not subtle and it was never loved locally, but the raised form is deliberate – the open plaza underneath it is public space, in a district with very little of it.

Ryogoku is the sumo neighbourhood. The Kokugikan, where the January, May and September tournaments are held, is two minutes away, and the streets between are full of chanko restaurants run by former wrestlers. Scheduling this museum on a tournament day gives you a genuinely excellent afternoon and a genuinely crowded station.

The Sumida Hokusai Museum, a small Kazuyo Sejima building devoted to the artist who was born and worked in this district, is a ten-minute walk and is the natural second stop.

Allow two hours for the permanent exhibition at a steady pace and three if you read the labels. The renovation has improved the English signage, but the audio guide is still where the depth is and it is worth the few minutes of setup.

It is an excellent wet-weather option: entirely indoors, large enough to absorb a rainy afternoon, and near the station. It is a poor last-minute evening option, since it closes at 17:30 with last entry at 17:00.

What it is not is a collection of masterpieces. If you want objects – swords, screens, Buddhist sculpture – go to the Tokyo National Museum instead. This is a history museum that explains, and its best exhibits are reconstructions rather than originals. People who arrive expecting the other kind of museum leave disappointed by one of the best-designed exhibitions in the country.