Edo-Tokyo Museum Reopens After 4 Years of Extensive Refurbishment

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:22 JST, April 1, 2026

Visitors lined up at the Edo-Tokyo Museum even before its doors opened on Tuesday after it reopened following four years of extensive refurbishment.

The museum introduces the history and culture of Tokyo and is in Sumida Ward, Tokyo.

One new feature in the permanent exhibition area that is catching visitors’ eyes is a model of Hattori Tokeiten, the Hattori watch store, that has been recreated on a 1:1 scale. The building was a landmark in Tokyo’s Ginza district in the Meiji era (1868-1912) and was the predecessor to the current Wako building.

Miori Kobayashi, a 9-year-old elementary school student from Setouchi, Okayama Prefecture, came to the museum with her grandmother.

“It was really fun because there were lots of exhibits to interact with, like riding in a kago palanquin and holding a [firefighter’s] matoi standard,” she said.

In the museum library on the seventh floor, there is a new section devoted to videos of interviewed people who experienced calamities during World War II, such as the Great Tokyo Air Raid.

From 1995 to 1999, the Tokyo metropolitan government interviewed 330 survivors of the war. The museum has videos of 198 people who agreed to have their interview be shown publicly. The videos can be searched by time periods and areas where the interviewees were affected by war-related disasters.