Ah, Edogawa! In Tokyo’s adolescent years, when it still went by its given name of Edo, this bayside landfill was home to the city’s working class, fishermen, recyclers, and manual laborers, who supported the thriving city’s infrastructure. If Kyoto was the heart of Japanese culture at the time, Edogawa would probably be the anus. Fast forward to a couple of centuries later, and the times, they are a changin’.

Today’s Edogawa retains its shitamachi (downtown) image, trading fancy department stores and urban skyscrapers (the monolithic apartment complexes of nearby Tsukishima notwithstanding) for shotengai shopping streets and canals crisscrossed with dozens of unique low bridges. The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo arrived in 1995 and gave budding artists a reason to visit or live in Edogawa. The area southeast of Kiyosumi Shirakawa station blossomed into one of Tokyo’s hottest coffee neighborhoods in the early 21st century, with trendy cafes sandwiched between independent and big-name roasters. This wave of hipster coffee joints and modern art brought a new dynamic to a neighborhood that was a reliable stronghold for traditional Edo culture.

A Museum Dedicated to Hokusai, Who Made Edogawa Famous

The renaissance of Edogawa likely began in the mid-19th century, when the availability and affordability of ukiyo-e woodblock prints enabled famous artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai (more on him later) to sell thousands of prints depicting famous destinations in Japan. Dozens of images of the Edogawa area appeared in Hiroshige’s “100 Views of Edo,” making the area a tourist attraction for out-of-towners nationwide.

It should come as no surprise that Edogawa was chosen as the location for the newest museum dedicated to the other great ukiyo-e artist, the Sumida Hokusai Museum. The museum is walking distance from the Ryogoku Station, built on the site of a former daimyo samurai lord’s residence. It’s difficult to miss the sleek, polished aluminum exterior of the building, which gently reflects the image of its surrounding neighborhood.

With three floors, the Sumida Hokusai Museum isn’t large, but reliably contains one of the finest collections of Hokusai’s art in the city. Most people are already familiar with his “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” which has been endlessly repurposed in pop culture, but Hokusai was a prolific artist whose volume of work must be seen to be believed. Like Hiroshige, he documented the culture of the Edogawa area in many of his works. Before he produced woodblock art, he was already a master illustrator who captured both beauty and humor in equal doses. A disturbingly realistic diorama captures the old master crouched over a drawing on his tatami floor while his wife wearily watches him work.

An Often Free Museum for Sumo Lovers in Ryogoku

Doubling back to Ryogoku Station, the Kokugikan National Sumo Arena stands proudly on its north side, in the shadow of the Edo-Tokyo Museum (which I will add more details about when it reopens in late 2025). Since this article is about parks and museums, I won’t go into detail about attending a sumo tournament here. In fact, I encourage you to come here when there is not a sumo tournament. Why? Because there is a small Sumo Museum inside the building.

While the museum is mainly of interest to those who already have some interest in or knowledge of sumo as a sport, it has a rotating display of sumo-related items and art that will surely please its fans. And the museum is absolutely free to enter, provided you come on a non-tournament day. If a tournament is in progress, you’ll need a ticket to get inside the building.

Kiyosumi Gardens – More than the Iwasaki Family Rock Collection

Hop on the Oedo Line train at Ryogoku for two stops until you reach Kiyosumi Shirakawa Station. Besides the aforementioned coffee town, the station is near two major attractions: Kiyosumi Gardens and the Fukagawa Edo Museum.

Alongside Rikugien, Koishikawa Korakuen, Hamarikyu, and Kyu Shiba-rikyu gardens, Kiyosumi is one of Tokyo’s major publicly-owned traditional Japanese gardens. Like most of the other gardens, it was first the property of a samurai lord during the Edo Period, then acquired by a wealthy businessman during the Meiji Period and finally donated to the city in the Showa Period.

In this instance, however, it was the Iwasaki family, founders of Mitsubishi, who elevated the garden to its current state of beauty. Created as a place to entertain important guests and for company employees to enjoy at other times, Iwasaki Yotaro used his fleet of company steamships to bring massive, distinguished stones from different parts of Japan to be used in the garden’s arrangements. Most visitors to the garden would hardly consider the rocks to be anything but part of the original landscape, and that is exactly how it was designed. For three generations, the Iwasaki family collected some of the most beautiful stones they could find across the nation and had them integrated into the garden design.

Admission to the garden is a paltry 150 yen for adults. Kiyosumi Garden is best enjoyed during the transitional seasons of Spring and Autumn. It is an excellent place for a stroll during parts of Summer when you can tolerate the heat and humidity, perhaps dressed in a summer yukata and carrying the most powerful hand fan you can find. You can skip it in Winter, the same for most Japanese gardens that don’t get snow, which is basically all of the ones in Tokyo.

Fukagawa Edo Museum – The Only Edo Game in Town til 2025

On the other hand, you should definitely pay a visit to the Fukagawa Edo Museum, about a five-minute walk from Kiyosumi Garden. It is just past an ancient public toilet that requires a distinct lack of modesty or a bladder at 115% capacity to make you want to use it.

Because “THE” Edo-Tokyo Museum has been undergoing renovations for several years, the smaller Fukagawa Edo Museum has been left to represent the early history of Tokyo, at least in this neighborhood. Conveniently, the enormous Edo-Tokyo Museum is nearby, next to Ryogoku Station, where we started from. But due in part to the proximity, once that museum reopens in late 2025, visitors to this museum may slow to a trickle.

Which would be a shame, in my opinion, as the experiences of the two museums are vastly different. At the Fukagawa Edo Museum, visitors can wander through a reconstruction of a block of the neighborhood around the museum as it was over 150 years ago. Take off your shoes and you can step inside the recreated homes of real people who lived here, see (and sometimes touch) articles like those they would have used in their daily lives.

The rich environment simulates day and night and the sounds associated with the different times. The Fukagawa Edo Museum was experiential before experiential was hip, so despite its age, it still feels fresh and interesting to first-time visitors. Although the museum is inexpensive to enter, free admission to this museum is also included in the Grutto Pass.

Coffee and Clams? Edogawa’s Famous Foods of Past and Present

It might be near lunch time when you are exploring the Kiyosumi area, and if it is, this is a great time to try one of Edo Tokyo’s traditional meals, Fukagawa meshi. One of the more famous restaurants for Fukagawa meshi is just a minute or two away from the museum: Fukagawa Kamasho.

What is Fukagawa meshi? Basically, it is a simple dish made with rice and asari clams cooked together. Clams are boiled in soy sauce or cooked in miso soup for flavor. You can also have a broth-style Fukagawa meshi, a soupy version that is great for warming you up on cold days.

I will warn you that if you don’t absolutely love clams, you may not want to try Fukagawa meshi at Fukagawa Kamasho. A bowl of Fukagawa meshi here is a bottomless pit of clams. At first, you devour them starry-eyed like, “I can’t believe there’s so many clams in this bowl!” As your stomach reaches capacity and you are still digging down into the bowl, it’s more like, “Haven’t I finished all these damn clams yet?” Delicious, yet frustrating.

If you are not a clam fanatic or just need a pick-me-up, head to one of the dozens of cafes in the Kiyosumi area for a quick or slow cup of Joe. Some people point to Blue Bottle Coffee’s decision to open a flagship shop here that started the café stampede into the area, but my gut feeling is that independent roasters like Arise Coffee Roasters were here long before that, and BB was just hitching a ride on the Caffeinated Train. History aside, the net result is that some of Tokyo’s – and perhaps Japan’s – best cafes and roasteries are located here, and half the fun is wandering through the neighborhood picking the one that suits you best.

Discover Cutting Edge Art at MOT

Continue walking east and you will find the final and largest museum destination of Edogawa, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, also known simply as MOT. How they arrived at that acronym is as big a mystery to me as it is to you.

MOT is not the only museum focused on modern art and artists in Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo is centrally located within the outer moat of the Imperial Palace. The collections and styles of the two museums differ dramatically, however, so it is certainly worth visiting both museums if you enjoy art from the 20th and 21st centuries.

The MOT underwent major changes during a renovation that lasted nearly three years completed in 2019. Since then, the museum has large and varied exhibition rooms for up to 8 temporary exhibitions per year and a large space to rotate its collection of 5,800 pieces of art.

A recent exhibition I attended was a personal collection of a major figure in the contemporary art scene. His collection included pieces from artists well known in the global modern art scene: Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, and Akira Yamaguchi. But he also collected pieces from up-and-coming artists in the hopes of inspiring them to keep producing art even through difficult times.

As the world’s attention turns more toward Japan, the works of contemporary Japanese artists are getting longer looks from art aficionados and collectors abroad. I hardly consider myself knowledgeable about the contemporary art scene of my adopted home country, but this exhibition helped give me a working knowledge of the subject should I ever find myself alone at a cocktail party.

After the MOT, I have some bad news for you. You’ve visited most of the area’s major attractions, and now you are a long walk from public transportation taking you back into central Tokyo. It’s about a 15-minute walk back to Kiyosumi Shirakawa Station, where you can catch either Oedo or Hanzamon Line trains, but you could also head south about the same distance to Kiba Station if you prefer the Tozai Line instead. Your feet may be aching, but you’ve had a full and hopefully fulfilling day exploring the museums and parks of Tokyo’s historic downtown, the Edogawa area. If you’re looking for other park and museum destinations around Tokyo, be sure to check my Tokyo Museum and Park Guide intro for some great ideas.