Museumed out

I think we can safely say that I have seen my fair share of museums.

So for a museum, inside or out, to overcome my jaundiced world weariness, it must be something special. Do me a favour, before you carry on reading this, go and look at a picture of the Edo Tokyo Museum on their website.

There, see what I mean? It looks like the bastard offspring of a Triffid and a Power Ranger. It is, apparently, inspired by an old warehouse and is the same height as the old Edo Tower, long since destroyed. Both of which seem like pretty flimsy excuses for the building but, I have to say, it works.

It works inside as well. The ground floor has the usual lobby areas and space for a temporary exhibition, there are no public spaces on floors two, three or four and floor seven has the restaurant. So you might think, all this and only 2 floors for the permanent exhibition? Well yes, except they are both the size of aircraft hangers and almost totally open plan.

The museum covers the history of the city from the seventeenth century when it was called Edo through the change to the Meiji era (and the name Tokyo) in the mid-nineteenth century to 1964 when, rather oddly, it was decided Tokyo was a modern city as it hosted the Olympics.

There are a number of collections issues around this – the biggest being that there aren’t any to speak of. The museum was created from scratch in 1993 with no objects. In addition, Tokyo has suffered its fair share of natural and man-made disasters: endless fires, a huge earthquake in 1923 and carpet bombing by the Americans in 1944/5. So, the vast majority of the houses (usually wooden) and objects that would tell the story of the city have been laid to waste.

Usually, I get uneasy with the use of replicas but this is handled adroitly, combining real stuff, quality reproductions, state of the art IT and fantastic models. At huge expense, models of houses, townscapes and palaces explain the sense of the city more than endless displays of cooking pots and kimonos.

Apropos of nothing, one of the tours the hotel is trying to sell us guests is entitled Industrial Tokyo and features as its piece de resistance a tour of Japan Airlines maintenance depot. I am off to book my place now – there is bound to be a free commemorative spanner thrown in...