Meiji
明治Browse Japan’s cultural heritage from the Meiji period (1868 – 1912). Filter by prefecture, type, and keyword, with concise stories, maps, and travel tips.
The main house of the Kawai Residence in Tama City, Tokyo, is an 1885 thatched farmhouse carrying two tiers of silkworm rooms inside its high roof space.
Kan'eiji's main hall was moved from Kita-in in Kawagoe in 1879, after the first burned in the 1868 Battle of Ueno. A seven-bay Tendai hall, it holds a hidden Yakushi.
Said to mark the seventeenth memorial of his first wife, this 1898 hall belongs to Shibusawa Eiichi, father of Japanese capitalism. Fine carvings fill its interior.
A 1902 farmhouse in Fussa, Tokyo, with a six-room plan, a corridor on three sides and an indoor bath. See the wedding room's alcove and a closet opening three ways.
A two-story earthen storehouse of 1904 in Fussa, Tokyo, with a separate metal roof and a battened wainscot. It held wedding trays, bowls and New Year water buckets.
A 1911 storehouse in Fussa, Tokyo, built by the main house's carpenter in the year the family opened the village post office. Its ground floor is a free gallery.
A timber kura of c.1884 in Higashiyamato, Tokyo, later rendered to mimic cut stone. Its oki-yane roof, iron fire doors, and the atelier Yoshioka Kenji never built.
A mid-Meiji farmhouse in Higashiyamato, Tokyo, that the painter Yoshioka Kenji reshaped over 46 years: a 35.5 cm pillar, kumiko transoms, an earth-floor atelier.
In Ome, Tokyo, the main house of Sōshidō is a Meiji silk-farm dwelling that the novelist Yoshikawa Eiji redesigned himself around 1948, writing beside its garden.
In Ome, Tokyo, the Western annex of Sōshidō held Yoshikawa Eiji's study. Built in late Meiji, it gathers materials from across Japan, from Seto tile to Ōya stone.
Kyoshoji Temple Guest Hall in Ikenohata, Tokyo, is a 1903 two-storey timber building whose wide east corridor was placed to command the view over Shinobazu Pond.
International Christian University Taizanso Kofukyo, a thatched 1925 tea house built around Matsuura Takeshiro's One-Mat Room of donated temple timber, in Mitaka.
The Shimoda Residence Bunko-gura in Nishitokyo, Tokyo, is a small Meiji-era earthen storehouse kept by a family of hereditary village headmen and registered in 2019.
Megumiso on the Shirayuri University campus in Chofu, Tokyo, is an early Meiji headman's farmhouse moved from Shuzenji in Izu, a large house now rare in Izu.
A square two-story clay storehouse of about 1875 in Nishitokyo with a separate roof, a Showa-era washed-stone base and black-plastered doors; registered 2018.
A Meiji-era yakuimon gate with a copper gable roof, paired board doors and wing walls, 2.7 m wide, fronting a Nishitokyo farmstead; a registered cultural property.
An 1875 two-story clay storehouse in Nishitokyo with a separate gabled roof, iron cladding added after the 1923 quake and carved window brackets; registered 2018.
In Yanaka, Taito City, this late-Meiji timber shop became a signboard building. Registered in 2023, it still bakes rice crackers over a sunken charcoal kiln.
Built in 1903, this small brick observatory has an octagonal ground floor, a circular upper floor and a rotating dome that once held an equatorial telescope.
Built in 1903, this single-story brick observatory has an octagonal plan and a pyramidal roof, and once held a meridian instrument for keeping precise time.