Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum

Listen to the gravel under your shoes. It crunches softly, and somewhere ahead a wooden door slides along its track. The air carries cut grass and old cedar from the trees of Koganei Park. You are in western Tokyo, far from the neon. Around you stand houses, shops and a bathhouse that once stood somewhere else entirely, each one carried here so it would not disappear.

This place is an open-air branch of the Edo-Tokyo Museum. It opened in the early 1990s. The idea is simple and slightly radical. Historic buildings that were scheduled for demolition were taken apart, moved, and rebuilt here, piece by piece. The result is not a single period frozen in amber. It is a walk through roughly three centuries of Tokyo life, from the Edo era, when the city was ruled by the shoguns, to the middle of the twentieth century.

Tokyo has a particular reason to need a place like this. The city has been rebuilt again and again. The great earthquake of 1923 flattened huge areas. The firebombing of the Second World War destroyed much of what remained. Then came decades of fast development, when old wooden buildings were cleared for concrete. So many of these structures are rare survivors... buildings that came through fire, quake and bulldozer by luck.

The grounds are loosely divided into zones. On the western side you find farmhouses and rural buildings. In the centre are the grander residences of the wealthy and powerful. On the eastern side is a recreated old shopping street, the kind of neighbourhood Tokyo people call shitamachi, meaning the low city, where merchants and craftsmen lived and worked. Moving between these zones feels like moving between social classes, as well as between centuries.

Start with the farmhouses if you can. Their thatched roofs are thick and steep, built to shed heavy rain. Step inside and your eyes need a moment. The interiors are dark, with packed earth floors near the entrance and raised wooden platforms for living. Often a sunken hearth sits in the floor. On some days staff light a fire there, and the smoke drifts up through the rafters. That smoke was not a nuisance. It helped protect the thatch and timber from insects.

Now to one of the most sobering houses on the site. This is the residence of Takahashi Korekiyo, a statesman who served as prime minister and, many times, as finance minister. In 1936 a group of young army officers attempted a coup, known as the February 26 Incident. Takahashi was killed in this house, in a room on the upper floor. Today the garden around the house is quiet and green. The contrast is hard to forget.

Not far away stands a very different home. It belonged to Maekawa Kunio, one of the founders of modern architecture in Japan. As a young man he worked in Paris in the studio of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French modernist. He built this house in the early 1940s, during wartime, when building materials were tightly controlled. Look at the tall, open living space and the large windows. Traditional Japanese forms and modernist ideas meet here in one simple wooden building.

Here is the first surprise most visitors miss. Studio Ghibli, the animation studio of Hayao Miyazaki, is based nearby in western Tokyo. Miyazaki is known to have loved this museum. It is often said that several buildings here shaped the world of the film Spirited Away. The Ghibli connection is even celebrated on the museum grounds, so keep an eye out for references as you walk the old shopping street.

That street is the heart of the eastern zone. Walk slowly. There is a stationery shop, a soy sauce shop, a flower shop, an old pub, and others. Many have their fronts open, so you can step inside. Look at the shelves and the counters, worn smooth by decades of hands. One shop has a wall of small wooden drawers that reaches high above your head. Fans of Spirited Away often compare it to the boiler room where the many-armed boiler man works.

At the end of the street you reach the bathhouse, a public bath known as Kodakara-yu. Its roof curves upward in the style of a temple, which was common for grand Tokyo bathhouses. Inside, look up at the wall above the baths. You will see a painted mural of Mount Fuji. That painted mountain was a standard feature of Tokyo bathhouses. Before most homes had their own baths, places like this were where whole neighbourhoods washed, talked and shared news.

Here is a second detail that rewards attention. Notice the separate entrances, and the raised seat between the two halves of the bathhouse. An attendant sat there, collecting payment and watching over both the men's side and the women's side. It is a small piece of social engineering, built in wood. Many visitors walk past it without understanding what it was for.

As you move between buildings, notice how the details change with time. Earlier buildings use paper screens, sliding doors and open plans that could change with the season. Later homes add glass windows, Western-style rooms, chairs and electric lights. Some wealthy houses mix both, with a formal Western reception room at the front and a Japanese living area behind. These mixed homes show a society learning, quite quickly, to live in two worlds at once.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment. Listen to the wind in the park trees, and the floorboards creaking under other visitors' feet. Every building around you was nearly lost. Each one was carried here, beam by beam, so that people today could walk through it. As you head back toward the gate, look at the rooftops once more... thatch, tile and copper, side by side, each one a different century of Tokyo.