Tokyo Blog News!

This is the metropolitan government’s ambitious attempt to present the history, art, disasters, science, culture, and architecture of Tokyo from its humble beginnings in 1590. The museum’s great visual displays create a vivid portrayal of Tokyo through the centuries.

After purchasing your tickets and taking the escalator to the sixth floor, you’ll enter the museum by walking over a replica of Nihombashi Bridge, the starting point for all roads leading out of old Edo. Exhibits covering the Edo Period portray the lives of the shoguns, merchants, craftsmen, and townspeople. The explanations are mostly in Japanese only, but there’s plenty to look at, including a replica of an old Kabuki theater, a model of a daimyo’s (feudal lord’s) mansion, portable floats used during festivals, maps and photographs of old Edo, and a row-house tenement.

There can be few beers that have given a name to a place. 

Named after Yebisu Beer, which made its debut in 1890 and to which both Ebisu Station and the surrounding neighborhood owe their names, it presents a high-tech explanation (in Japanese only) of an age-old process. I especially like the gallery of old beer advertisements, but it’s not always on display.

Now it`s a part of the Sapporo Beer company, the Beer Museum Yebisu is on the original site, part of one of Tokyo’s most distinctive landmarks, the Yebisu Garden Place.