National Showa Memorial Museum Audio Guide

National Showa Memorial Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to National Showa Memorial Museum

   Welcome to the National Showa Memorial Museum, known in Japanese as Shōwakan, in the Chiyoda ward of central Tokyo. A quick word on what this guide covers. The museum itself is a national institution, and what I can say with confidence is who runs it, what kind of collection it keeps, and the remarkable ward around it. I will not invent galleries or exhibits for you. Those you will discover with your own eyes inside. Here is what is certain. The National Showa Memorial Museum is a national museum managed by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. People commonly call it the Showakan, and it primarily displays items that illustrate the lifestyles of the Japanese people. So this is a museum about ordinary life, the things people lived with, rather than a palace or a monument. Over the next few stops we will look at what that means, then step back to the extraordinary ward that surrounds the museum, from its name to its buildings to the way it changes between day and night.

2. 02

   A National Museum of Everyday Life at National Showa Memorial Museum

   Most national museums tell the story of rulers, treaties and battles. The National Showa Memorial Museum is built around something quieter and, in a way, more personal: the lifestyles of the Japanese people. Think of the objects that fill a household, the things people wore, used and kept close, and you are already thinking along the lines of this collection. It is also a museum with an official parent. It is managed by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, which tells you it is a national institution rather than a private collection or a small local museum. The name carries the idea too. Showa is the name of an era in Japan, and a memorial museum bearing that name invites you to look at a period through everyday things. As you walk through, try this: choose one ordinary object and ask what daily life around it must have felt like. That is the kind of question a museum of lifestyles is built to answer.

3. 03

   The Ward Around National Showa Memorial Museum

   The National Showa Memorial Museum stands in Chiyoda, a special ward right in the heart of Tokyo's 23 special wards. Chiyoda is built around the Imperial Palace and a surrounding radius of about a kilometer, and it is known as the political and financial center of Japan. The name itself is a story. Chiyoda means field of a thousand generations, and it was inherited from Chiyoda Castle, the other name for Edo Castle, which stands on the site of today's Imperial Palace. So the ward's very name looks back to the castle at the origin of the city. The ward as you know it today is young. It was formed in 1947, when Kanda and Kōjimachi wards merged after Tokyo City became the Tokyo Metropolis. That is a fitting neighborhood for a museum devoted to the modern past: a place whose present shape was itself drawn in the decades of recent history.

4. 04

   Two Tokyos Near National Showa Memorial Museum

   Chiyoda holds two different Tokyo personalities in one ward. The Kanda area sits in the core of Shitamachi, the original commercial center of Edo and Tokyo. The western part of Kōjimachi is typically seen as a Yamanote district. Shitamachi and Yamanote are the old geographic and cultural divisions of the city, and in Chiyoda you can feel both of them. Then there is the question of scale. Chiyoda is home to the National Diet, the Prime Minister's Official Residence, the Supreme Court and the ministries of Kasumigaseki. Landmarks such as Yasukuni Shrine and the Nippon Budokan are here too. Only about 66,680 people lived in the ward as of October 2020, yet its daytime population is around 850,000, the highest day-to-night ratio of any municipality in Japan. The ward is also rich in older architecture. A great many Meiji, Taisho and Showa-era buildings still stand across Chiyoda, among them the red-brick Ministry of Justice building, erected in 1895 by German architects. Keep your eyes up as you walk, because the city's earlier chapters are written on its facades.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from National Showa Memorial Museum

   You now have the frame: a national museum of everyday life, in a ward whose name means field of a thousand generations, where old Shitamachi meets Yamanote and where a few dozen people per household square meter of daily life give way each morning to hundreds of thousands of commuters. What the galleries hold in detail is yours to discover. As you explore, notice how the ordinary things on display sit in contrast with the grand institutions of the ward outside. When you step back onto the street, take a slow look around. Ask yourself which buildings seem to belong to an earlier chapter of Tokyo, and which belong to today. Chiyoda rewards curious walkers, and the National Showa Memorial Museum is a good place to start asking.