If you visit Rikugien Garden or Koishikawa Botanical Gardens, walk a little bit more and you will find a unique museum of Toyo Bunko Library. It was built in 1924 by Mitsubishi clan as a library for the oriental studies. Today, they have about one million books of Asian countries and ...
Category: Tokyo
Finding Your Favourite in Artisans’ Town KuramaeFinding Your Favourite in Artisans’ Town Kuramae
Kuramae has quite a few artisans’ workshops. Sometimes the town is called as Brooklyn in Tokyo. If you visit those workshops, you may find something special is waiting for you. Those crafts are what you cannot find in the ordinary chain stores or branches of large-scale retail shops. ...
Window-Shopping in the Wholesalers’ Town of KuramaeWindow-Shopping in the Wholesalers’ Town of Kuramae
Kuramae is a town of wholesalers. As I wrote in the previous posting, there are shops old and new. Kuramae in Japanese means “in front of the rice warehouses”. It was called so because there used to be rice warehouses where Edo Government during 17th – 19th Century kept rice ...
Finding Craft Shops in KuramaeFinding Craft Shops in Kuramae
Kuramae is not far from Asakusa and a kind of “emerging artisanal area” as lots of craft shops lined up along the street. Some of them are century-old shops and some are new comers including trendy cafes. There is a good mixture of old and new. ...
Strolling along the Plants Market in AsakusaStrolling along the Plants Market in Asakusa
One of the largest plants markets is held in Asakusa every year at the last weekend of May and June. Japanese people love growing plants since the old times. People go to plants markets and buy a flower pot or two. Sometimes they are bonsai pots. If you visit Asakusa at ...