Hyper Edohaku Ginza

From Edo to Tokyo

A new version of Hyper Edohaku, the Edo-Tokyo Museum’s popular interactive phone app, is now available.

Take a journey back in time to Ginza during the Meiji period, when Japan experienced rapid Westernization, and discover the birth of modern Japanese culture and customs.

In 1868, the Edo period came to an end, bringing to a close more than two and a half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa shoguns. The city formerly known as Edo now became Tokyo and the curtain rose on the Meiji period: the era of Japanese modernization.

Japan began to import a wide array of ideas, technologies, values, and culture from the West, quickly developing into a modern nation-state. With this app, experience the rapidly changing city and lives of ordinary people during this time, as told through the story of one family.

Find 100 Items from the Museum Collection

The tale unfolds around an intersection in the Ginza 4-chome neighborhood of Tokyo. Ginza, which truly came into its own at this time, is thrillingly recreated in 3D, based on a model of its tiled architecture in the Edo-Tokyo Museum collection. The district encapsulated how the city was then an evolving, exciting blend of the new and the old, of Japanese and Western. Hidden in the landscape are 100 items, especially selected from the 360,000 in the museum collection!

Travel across Four Phases of the Meiji Period

The app divides up the 45 tumultuous years of the Meiji period into four phases. See how things changed for the city and its inhabitants, starting from the first year of Meiji, when the signs of the feudal era remained strong. The app tells the story of a family through the eyes of a boy and girl growing up across these four phases.

What Was New in Meiji?

Many of the things we taken for granted about Japanese life and society are actually quite recent and only arrived during the Meiji period. From red bean jam pastries to electricity and gas, telephones, railroads and cars, and shoes and hats, the new era ushered in a huge number of innovations to daily life. Many of Japan’s most famous writers and cultural figures, like the novelists Natsume Soseki and Nagai Kafu, also appeared at this time.