architectural museum, part one
Near the Smith's apartment in Koganei there is a good-sized public park that, in addition to playgrounds, biketrails, and ballfields, also houses the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, an extension of the main Tokyo historical museum downtown. Berek and I biked over to the park late Friday morning to take a look around the museum, which is composed of over 30 various structures dating from the 1600s to the present that have all been moved to one location both as an architectural exhibition and as an attempt to preserve building that would otherwise be at risk.
The first structure that we visited (after the main entrance building) was the Tokiwadai Photo Studio, a structure dating from pre-war 1937 Japan, as part of what was then a suburban residential neighborhood. This was a room on the main floor:
The second floor housed a spacious photography study with large windows in order to provide the light necessary for taking photographs. I also realized at this point that I would have to remove my shoes before entering each of these exhibition buildings and was wishing I had worn shoes that were easier to slip off and on.
Next to the studio was the mansion of the very wealthy Hachirouemon Mitsui, the original portions of which date from 1897 in Kyoto and were moved after World War II to Minato City where the building was completes in 1952. This is the gate to the mansion:
The figure you see standing in the gate was an extension of an exhibit in the main building of the museum full of cartoons (by a well-known cartoonist, I think) depicting traditional Japanese scenes, except that they were populated with ghosts and spooks. Here is one example of these cartoonish scenes:
The exhibit was set up so that each scene was depicted twice: once as it would ordinarily appear to the casual observer, and then again, with the ghosts and spooks made visible, manifestions of natural powers or the dead or artifacts. Sometimes one of the people depicted in the first picture turned out to be a non-human spirit in the second picture (such as the round-headed fellow carrying buckets, above). Many of the ghosts were portrayed as humorous or pranksters, though some were rather more severe or dark.
Here is a close-up the ghost who was standing within the mansion gate:
There were also a couple of people in weird, but funny ghost-costumes wandering around the grounds waving at people and having their pictures taken with children. I thought it was all a bit creepy, despite the humorous edge.
The interior of the Mitsui mansion was beautiful, with wall-hangings, goldleaf, and light, simple furniture, all coming together in a sparse but peaceful and harmonious aesthetic:
Just outside the doors of the mansion stretched a relatively small, but very green and lush Japanese-style garden, nicely complementing the interior of the home:
I was particularly intrigued by the array of interlocking rooflines on the mansion, all tiled in traditional Japanese fashion, and splaying out at angles lower than typical in most western architecture, particularly that of northern Europe where snow loads can be a worry:
The architectural museum also contained a number of farmhouses of varying age, all with thatched roofs, this one (dating from the late Edo period) open on the ends in order to allow smoke from the interior fire pits to escape:
The roofing system under the thatch in these farmhouses was a complex interlacing of hand-hewn beams, overlaid with long poles and then thatched over the top:
The main walls, as seen above, are daub and wattle, particularly higher up and at the corners of the buildings, while the lower walls, particularly on the sides and in the interior, were light frameworks of wood either panelled with slivered bamboo or with paper stretched across them:
In this picture you can also see the customary mat floors as well as the shelf up above which, I believe, would have been used for religious purposes, such as housing deities.
(continue to next post: architectural museum, part two)
The first structure that we visited (after the main entrance building) was the Tokiwadai Photo Studio, a structure dating from pre-war 1937 Japan, as part of what was then a suburban residential neighborhood. This was a room on the main floor:
The second floor housed a spacious photography study with large windows in order to provide the light necessary for taking photographs. I also realized at this point that I would have to remove my shoes before entering each of these exhibition buildings and was wishing I had worn shoes that were easier to slip off and on.
Next to the studio was the mansion of the very wealthy Hachirouemon Mitsui, the original portions of which date from 1897 in Kyoto and were moved after World War II to Minato City where the building was completes in 1952. This is the gate to the mansion:
The figure you see standing in the gate was an extension of an exhibit in the main building of the museum full of cartoons (by a well-known cartoonist, I think) depicting traditional Japanese scenes, except that they were populated with ghosts and spooks. Here is one example of these cartoonish scenes:
The exhibit was set up so that each scene was depicted twice: once as it would ordinarily appear to the casual observer, and then again, with the ghosts and spooks made visible, manifestions of natural powers or the dead or artifacts. Sometimes one of the people depicted in the first picture turned out to be a non-human spirit in the second picture (such as the round-headed fellow carrying buckets, above). Many of the ghosts were portrayed as humorous or pranksters, though some were rather more severe or dark.
Here is a close-up the ghost who was standing within the mansion gate:
There were also a couple of people in weird, but funny ghost-costumes wandering around the grounds waving at people and having their pictures taken with children. I thought it was all a bit creepy, despite the humorous edge.
The interior of the Mitsui mansion was beautiful, with wall-hangings, goldleaf, and light, simple furniture, all coming together in a sparse but peaceful and harmonious aesthetic:
Just outside the doors of the mansion stretched a relatively small, but very green and lush Japanese-style garden, nicely complementing the interior of the home:
I was particularly intrigued by the array of interlocking rooflines on the mansion, all tiled in traditional Japanese fashion, and splaying out at angles lower than typical in most western architecture, particularly that of northern Europe where snow loads can be a worry:
The architectural museum also contained a number of farmhouses of varying age, all with thatched roofs, this one (dating from the late Edo period) open on the ends in order to allow smoke from the interior fire pits to escape:
The roofing system under the thatch in these farmhouses was a complex interlacing of hand-hewn beams, overlaid with long poles and then thatched over the top:
The main walls, as seen above, are daub and wattle, particularly higher up and at the corners of the buildings, while the lower walls, particularly on the sides and in the interior, were light frameworks of wood either panelled with slivered bamboo or with paper stretched across them:
In this picture you can also see the customary mat floors as well as the shelf up above which, I believe, would have been used for religious purposes, such as housing deities.
(continue to next post: architectural museum, part two)
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