Hey everyone!!
I recently went to the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, which is said to have inspired Hayao Miyazaki in creating Spirited Away! I'm sure almost everyone has watched that movie right? I actually never watched it before... I'm in the minority. haha but because of the Ramune to Anime class I am, one of themes was "Where does Contemporary Japanese culture" come from, and for that week's film, we watched Spirited Away. I really liked it, and so I decided to go check out the museum that inspired the director to make such an amazing movie! I also wrote this in my report, so I will give you guys snippets of it :) There is some plot detail in it, so if you have not watched the movie yet and don't want to be spoiled, maybe you can just look at the pictures!
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| Entrance to the museum! (which is actually outdoors) |
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| Name of the museum! |
Walking into the park to the entrance of the museum, the scenery was very beautiful. Everything I saw in my eyes was green: the leaves, the trees, the branches. When we went through the entrance of the museum and received a ticket, we set out to explore what was inside the museum.
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| The Onsen place! |
There were lots of different culturally significant architectural buildings preserved. As the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Museum website describes, “the museum aims to relocate, reconstruct, preserve and exhibit historical buildings of great cultural value that are impossible to preserve at their actual places as well as to inherit these valuable cultural heritages to future generations”. My favorite area was the shopping street, filled with umbrella shops, stationary shops, a bar, an onsen, etc. Because I had just recently watched an onsen movie on the flight from America to Japan, the images of how traditional and modern onsen look like are fresh in
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| Calligraphy pens! |
my mind. The onsen, called Kodakarayu (子宝湯), looked very familiar, with shelves of straw baskets for the customers to put their clothes in and the shower area in preparation for the onsen. I also really liked the stationary store, Takeishoudou (武居三省堂 - 文具店) because the items inside were so real and plentiful. For example, I really liked the calligraphy pens, which came in all sizes, ranging from small to very large. Also they had lots of bottles of calligraphy ink and even the stone ones where you rub
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| Old-fashioned Koban! |
to get the black ink. Near the stationary shop was a Japanese umbrella shop, in which they also showed little displays of the steps in making an umbrella. Outside the main shopping street, there was also an old-fashioned koban (which is a police box, very useful in providing directions to places you are unfamiliar with and picking up your wallet that you left on the train!) and an old-fashioned yellow train.
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| The yellow train |
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| Kyuujishouinotamaya (旧自証院霊屋) |
While walking throughout the museum, I can see some of the similarities between Spirited Away and the buildings inside Open-Air museum. For example, the Kyuujishouinotamaya (旧自証院霊屋) was
built by her daughter as a memorial for a concubine of a very powerful Shogunate warrior. With a very traditional Oriental exterior, this house resembles the bathhouse owned by Yubaba that Chihiro worked at. Therefore, this may have played a role when Miyazaki Hayao was designing the appearance of the bathhouse. Looking at the last kanji of the building’s name, “霊,” it has a meaning of “soul; spirit,” exactly paralleling the spirits on the other side of the world where Chihiro and her parents were trapped in. In addition, although the onsen bathhouse at the museum,
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| Me inside the train! |
which I described earlier, does not resemble anything like that of the movie, it may have sparked some interest in Miyazaki Hayao’s mind when contemplating the business of the house in the other world. Also, a similar structure at the museum also appeared in the movie: the yellow train that Chihiro hopped on from the bathhouse to Yubaba’s twin sister’s house, in an attempt to apologize for Haku’s actions of stealing a precious stamp and to plea for help. The train structure itself did not have any details, except that it was an old train. However, at the entrance to the museum, near the gift shop, there is a picture of Miyazaki Hayao with No-Face standing in front of the same yellow train!
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| Hayao Miyazaki and No-Face |
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| An old piece of architecture! |
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| The beautiful nature |
I really enjoyed the museum because it was interesting seeing the different buildings of preservations and the kind of culture the ancient people had. Every time we turned the corner to go to the next building, it felt as if we were in another world because each structure had its own unique properties; it was impossible to predict what would be next. Especially because everything was embedded into the beautiful, green park, it felt as if I were walking through one of Miyazaki Hayao’s films.
