Meiji Mura Museum

Occupying an area of 1,000,000m2 this open-air architectural museum in Inuyama, near Nagoya at Aichi prefecture, preserves and exhibits over sixty buildings from Japan's Meiji, Taisho, and early Shōwa periods. It was opened on March 18th, 1965. A seminal figure behind the creation of the Meiji Mura compound that resembles a village, was the architect Yoshiro Taniguchi (1904-1979), its first director, known for his important public projects, such as museums (e.g the Honkan & Toyokan wings of Tokyo’s National Museum), theatres, monuments, universities and industrial buildings, etc. With a preservation vision regarding in particular architectural heritage of the Meiji period, Taniguchi was decisive in this process of saving cultural architectural properties from destruction. In partnership with Moto-o Tsuchikawa (1903-1974), at that time, Vice President of the Nagoya Rail Road Company, they established the Meiji-Mura museum. The original locations of the buildings range from nearly all the islands of Japan to as far as Hawaii, Brazil and Seattle, EUA. One of the museum’s highlights is Frank Lloyd Wright's Tokyo Imperial Hotel (1922) | photos by Martin Grossmann | visited in March 2016 | URL: https://www.meijimura.com/english/