After a longer-than-expected renovation, this Ryogoku museum is finally ready to tell the human stories of Edo and Tokyo once again. Many travel guides will say that the Tokyo National Museum, in Ueno

After a longer-than-expected renovation, this Ryogoku museum is finally ready to tell the human stories of Edo and Tokyo once again.

Many travel guides will say that the Tokyo National Museum, in Ueno Park, is Tokyo’s best museum, and with hundreds of officially recognized Important Cultural Properties, it definitely has a claim to that distinction. However, the Tokyo National Museum is first and foremost an art museum, and while its collection spans thousands of years of priceless pieces, they’re sometimes of such scholarly importance that they’re presented in ways that can make it hard to see how their historical context relates to the human side of Japanese culture unless you already have a background in Japanese historical studies.

So there’s an argument to be made that Tokyo’s best museum, especially for international travelers, is actually the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Located  in the Ryogoku neighborhood, the museum focuses on the span from the establishment of Edo (Tokyo’s former name) as the capital of the Tokugawa Shogunate through Tokyo’s economic recovery and subsequent prosperity following World War II, so the Edo-Tokyo Museum still covers roughly 400 years of Japanese history, but does so with a more human-oriented approach.

However, for quite some time the question of “Should you visit the Edo-Tokyo Museum or the National Museum?” has been moot, since the Edo-Tokyo Museum closed for renovations in the spring of 2022 for extensive renovations. The original timetable said the project would be done in three years, but it ended up taking one more. As of today, though, the Edo-Tokyo Museum is finally open again.

As the seat of power for the last 300 years of feudal rule,** Edo was a center of samurai activity, but the country finally having a unified government also made the city a vibrant cultural epicenter, with ukiyo-e painters essentially creating the genre of popular art among the common people and the courtesans of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter influencing fashion developments**. The museum’s exhibits are designed to tell the stories of all those groups, with representative historical artifacts and recreations of shopfronts and homes showing that history is comprised of the lives lead by the people of the times.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum is open as of March 31, and is conveniently located right next to Tokyo’s Kokugikan sumo arena, another great place to immerse yourself in Japanese culture, even if you don’t yet know much about it.

Related: Edo-Tokyo Museum official website