Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum: 9 Best Buildings

The Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum is a seven hectare park in western Tokyo where around thirty historic buildings have been taken apart, moved and rebuilt on a single site. It covers the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and instead of fragments and scale models behind glass you get the real thing at full size: farmhouses, a merchant’s mansion, a soy sauce shop, a stationery store, a police box and a public bathhouse, standing on their own streets.

Almost all of these buildings were days away from being lost. They survived demolition, earthquake and wartime fire because someone moved them here. Most are open, so you can take your shoes off, step up onto the tatami and stand in the middle of them.

Need to Know Before You Go

• Admission: ¥400 for adults
• Closed: Mondays, or the following weekday when Monday is a public holiday
• Hours: these vary by season, so check before you travel
• Nearest station: Musashi-Koganei on the JR Chuo Line
• From Shinjuku: about 30 minutes on the Chuo Line
• From Shibuya: about 35 minutes on the Inokashira Line to Kichijoji, then the Chuo Line
• How long to allow: two to three hours

💡 Astuce pour le Japon : You need to take your shoes off to go inside most of the buildings, and you will be doing it over and over. Slip-ons save a lot of fiddling, and wear socks — some of the older floors are cold even in summer.

9 Buildings Not to Miss

The museum splits into three zones. If you only have a couple of hours, these are the nine worth prioritizing.

Building	Zone	Why stop
Visitor Center (former Kokaden)	Center	Ceremonial hall from 1940, now the ticket desk, shop and exhibition room
Jisho-in Mausoleum	Center	Small vermilion and gold hall at the end of a hedged path
House of Korekiyo Takahashi	Center	Home of a leading Meiji and Taisho era statesman
Residence of Hachiroemon Mitsui	West	The grandest building on site, with a formal garden
Farmhouse of the Yoshino Family	West	Edo period thatch with a sunken hearth you can stand beside
House of Georg de Lalande	West	Western style timber house with a cafe and terrace seating
Kodakara-yu public bathhouse	East	Temple style frontage linked to Spirited Away
Kodera Soy Sauce Shop	East	Shopfront and stock left as they were
Takei Sanshodo stationery store	East	Back wall built as a grid of small wooden drawers

Getting to the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum

Musashi-Koganei is a quiet residential stretch of western Tokyo that feels a long way from Shibuya, which is part of the appeal. It makes an easy half day out and one of the more rewarding day trips from central Tokyo by train.

Arrival at Musashi-Koganei Station

From Shinjuku it is roughly thirty minutes on the JR Chuo Line. Come out at the North Exit, then take a Seibu bus from stop 2 or 3 and get off at Koganei-koen Nishi-guchi. You can also walk the whole way if you would rather stretch your legs after the train.

The Walk Through Koganei Park

The bus drops you at the edge of Koganei Park, the second largest park run by the city, and the museum sits inside it. From the Nishi-guchi stop it is a flat, well signposted five minute walk along the main paved path to the entrance plaza.

The park is worth the extra few minutes on its own. There are more than 1,700 cherry trees here for spring, heavy green canopy through summer and good color in autumn, so what you see depends entirely on when you visit Tokyo.

The Center Zone: The Entrance Hall and a Gilded Mausoleum

Start in the Center Zone. The Visitor Center is the former Kokaden, a ceremonial hall built in 1940 and later moved out here, and it now holds the ticket desk, the shop and an exhibition room. It is a good place to pick up the site map before you commit to a route.

A short walk behind it, at the end of a path lined with clipped hedges, is the Jisho-in Mausoleum. It is small, vermilion and gold, and it is the one building on the site that stops most people in their tracks. The Center Zone also holds the House of Korekiyo Takahashi, the home of one of the most significant statesmen of the Meiji and Taisho eras.

💡 Astuce pour le Japon : Most visitors turn right for the East Zone as soon as they are through the gate. Go straight ahead instead. The Center Zone is quieter, it is a gentler introduction, and the mausoleum photographs far better before the crowd arrives.

The East Zone: Old Downtown Tokyo

The East Zone rebuilds a shitamachi street, the old downtown, with shopfronts from the Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods facing each other across a road. Several are clad in copper that has weathered to a deep green. Nearly all of them are open, and the interiors are stocked as they would have been.

The building at the end of the street is the Kodakara-yu public bathhouse, and it is the reason a lot of people come. Its temple style frontage, with a sweeping curved gable and carved panels above the entrance, is widely thought to have fed into the bathhouse in Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away.

Working down the street you get the Kodera Soy Sauce Shop, still lined with bottles and cans; Takei Sanshodo, a stationery store whose back wall is a grid of small wooden drawers; Maruni Shoten, a kitchenware store with brass kettles and woven baskets hanging from the ceiling; and Yamatoya, a dried goods store with bonito and dried fish laid out on angled trays.

At the entrance to the zone sits Toden car 7514, a yellow Tokyo streetcar parked on a short length of track with its destination board still set for Shimbashi. You can climb aboard.

💡 Astuce pour le Japon : This is the largest and busiest zone, so give it the most time. It is also where the best photographs are — the street, the bathhouse frontage and the streetcar in particular.

The West Zone: A Merchant Mansion, Farmhouses and Modernism

The West Zone runs from Edo period thatched farmhouses to Western influenced homes of the early twentieth century, along a lane the museum calls Yamanote Street.

The Residence of Hachiroemon Mitsui is the biggest and grandest building on the site. It belonged to the Mitsui merchant family, and its scale shows: wide tatami rooms, sliding screens that open along a whole wall, and a formal garden with sculpted pines that you look out over from the veranda.

At the other end of the range is the Farmhouse of the Yoshino Family, where you can stand inside and see the irori, the sunken hearth that heated the room and the household’s food.

Where to Eat Inside the Museum

There are two options and they suit different moods. The House of Georg de Lalande in the West Zone, a white timber house with a red roof, has a cafe with terrace seating for coffee and cake. Over in the East Zone, Kura serves Musashino udon, the thick, chewy local style.

What to Do Next in the Neighborhood

Two to three hours covers the museum properly, which leaves the afternoon open. Both of the obvious next stops are east along the Chuo Line.

Three stops takes you to Mitaka for the Ghibli Museum, which needs a ticket booked in advance. One stop further is Kichijoji, good for vintage shopping, a walk around Inokashira Park and dinner in one of the izakaya near the station.

💡 Astuce pour le Japon : Ghibli Museum tickets sell out well ahead and are dated and timed, so if you want to pair the two in one day, book that first and build the museum visit around it.

Is It Worth the Trip?

If you have any interest in how buildings work, yes. This is one of the few places in Tokyo where you can walk through four hundred years of the city’s architecture in an afternoon and touch almost all of it. It is also genuinely quiet on a weekday, which is not something you can say about much else here.

For more of the same, our Tokyo museum guide covers the rest of the city’s collections, Asakusa is the closest thing Tokyo has to a surviving old town at full scale, and Todoroki Valley is the other side of this coin — a green pocket of the city that most visitors never reach.