It consists of a large, covered, life-size replica of a Tokyo shitamachi neighborhood from around 1840, near the end of the Tokugawa period. It includes 11 buildings: houses, shops, a theater, a boathouse, a tavern, and a fire tower, all built using traditional techniques. Visitors can walk down the streets and enter the shops and houses. The lighting varies over time, to reproduce different times of day.[1][2][3]
The museum opened in 1986, six years after the Shitamachi Museum and seven years before the Edo-Tokyo Museum, all part of a national trend for building local history museums. The exhibits for all three were primarily designed by Total Media.[4]