Excursion 1 Optional Tour

Excursion 1 Optional Tour: Famous places from Edo period walking

Date and time
September 12, 2018 (Wednesday), 13:00 – 14:30 pm.

Number of participants
10 persons *If number of registered participants exceed 10 persons, we will choose participants by drawing lottery.

Registration
This is the Optional Tour of Excursion 1. Please register Tour to Galleries of Tokyo National Museum with an introduction to the museum and select “I will join in it" to Optional walking tour.
This optional tour is fully booked.

Excursion regulations and guideline

  1. This walking tour will take approximately one and a half hour. We will walk from the main venue to Tokyo National Museum and visit famous places of Edo along the way.
  2. We will walk around on the concrete pavement during summer so, please bring some drink and wear comfortable shoes.
  3. We plan to visit some Confucianism and Shinto religious facilities.
  4. Small children are not allowed to participate due to very long distance walking.
  5. This tour is largely depended on the weather. In case of bad weather, such as rain, fierce heat or typhoon, the tour will be canceled. In that case, we will inform excursion participants by e-mail as soon as we get the weather information.
  6. If number of registered participants exceed 10 persons, we will choose participants by drawing lottery.

Walking route
Main venue - Suidobashi – Yushima-seido – Kandamyojin – Akihabara – (Take Train to Ueno, 170 JPY) – Ueno – Tokyo National Museum

Description
In the Edo period (17th to 19th century) of Japan, various travel guidebooks such as Meisho-ki (名所記) are published. Meisho means famous places in Japanese. Edo (present Tokyo) was the center of the Tokugawa Shogunate, so there were a lot of guidebooks about the city.
Today, these old guidebooks are provided online as open data. For example, the National diet library and the National Institute of Japanese Literature provide some old guidebooks in IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) platform. In order to leveraging open data, the Center for Open Data in the Humanities (CODH) is making database of famous places from multiple old guidebooks.
Nowadays, some famous places of the Edo period still remain the same as the original, but some are very different from the period. We will provide illustrations of Edo from old guidebooks and you will experience the continuity and discontinuity between Edo and Tokyo. If you bring tablet pc or smart phone, we can show beta version of the old guidebooks list based on Omeka.

Suidobashi (水道橋) from Edo Meisho Zue (江戸名所図会) and present landscape.
suidobashi present suidobashi

Yushima-seido (湯島聖堂) from Edo Meisho Zue (江戸名所図会) and present landscape.
seido present seido

Edo Meisho Zue (江戸名所図会) in "Dataset of Pre-Modern Japanese Text"（from Collection of Ajinomoto Foundation For Dietary Culture）（CC BY-SA）



Title photo from flickr, by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center(CC BY-NC 2.0)