Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum

The Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum is a free museum in the Sumida area, built in 1931 to commemorate the Kanto Earthquake of 1923. With the additional devastation that Tokyo suffered in air raids during WW2, the museum now has exhibits covering both of those tragedies.

For a free museum, I thought it was rather interesting! However I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit here, and maybe it can be tacked on with a visit to the nearby Edo-Tokyo Museum or Hokusai Museum.

The first floor covers the earthquake. Many people died due to widespread fires that broke out (the earthquake occurred around midday, when everyone had the fire on preparing lunch), but even worse, many Koreans were massacred due to misinformation that spread in the general panic after the earthquakes (geez). I know only a sparse amount of Japan’s history so I didn’t really know about this, but my husband did tell me that this is something he learned (albeit maybe only briefly) while at school. Although there are politicians these days that deny this even occurred, so I’m glad in this museum at least it stayed fairly factual.

There was also a display on the amount of aid that foreign countries gave - notably I think America and the UK gave the most. I’m sure relations between Japan and US/UK were much better before WW2…

Also preserved was a collection of drawings done by children recollecting the scenes they saw after the earthquake.

The second floor housed an exhibit on the air raids of WW2. This one was smaller, but I enjoyed some more of the art that they had on display here.

These included some sketches done by a local artist called Hirosaku Urushibata. Every day he would head to the black markets that popped up after WW2, and would do a simple watercolour sketch of what the people were buying, plus the prices of the goods being sold.

The art itself is simple, but I just found it really interesting that even in the hopelessness of a post-WW2 Japan, you could do something simple like sketch everyday, and then have that end up becoming a priceless historical artifact that gets placed in a museum. Pretty cool.

And some more from another artist called Hideaki Ishikawa, who did sketches of the Tokyo area post-WW2.

Finally to round off the museum, they had a very ad-hoc display of some broken gargoyles along the wall.

These used to sit guard on the outside of the building, but their snouts were more fragile and had since crumbled away.

Some artists set out to try and reconstruct what the gargoyles might have looked like - they didn’t have exact references to go off of, but knew of the art style of the original sculptor.

Once you head back outside, you can see the newly-made gargoyles perched up near the roof.

Right next to the Museum is also the Tokyo Memorial Hall.

This was formerly the site of a clothing depot, where 38,000 people died in a fire after the earthquake (many people had evacuated to this spot, and then a firestorm broke out). We didn’t head inside, but I think there’s a small museum of sorts inside it as well.

On the corners of the building are some perched bird gargoyles. The same architect designed both buildings, and it seemed he had a penchant for doing gargoyles. I thought it was a pigeon or a sparrow, my husband thought it was a phoenix - but looking online it just seems to be a “bird of some sort” and not actually something specific.

Speaking of birds, we also saw pigeons with some cool colouring.

All-in-all it’s a bit of a depressing museum to visit (and probably even read about) but I’ve started taking an interest in art lately, so it was interesting to visit from that perspective as well.