Slide open the door to a two-story wooden house in Tokyo's Ota Ward and enter into the life of an ordinary family in the mid-Showa Era, when people lived in homes with mostly tatami rooms, wooden furniture, traditional cooking tools and fetched their water from a well.

"Many houses built in the Showa Era (1926-1989) have been reconstructed into Western-style homes," said Kazuko Koizumi, who converted the home built by her father and used by her family for 45 years into the Showa Living History Museum.

"Japanese houses like ours were simple and life in those days was inconvenient," said Koizumi, a historian of architecture who teaches at Gakushuin University in Tokyo and Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music in Nagakute.

"When we face problems that stem from society's current conveniences and materialism, our museum, with its old-style household goods, may give people a new perspective."

The home, with a 39-sq.-meter first floor and 21 sq.-meter second floor, has attracted about 500 people since its opening at the end of February, with some coming from as far as Nagoya and Niigata.

The first floor, comprised of a study, a dining room, a living room and a small kitchen, features a Shinto altar, an old radio, tableware, kitchen tools and kimono -- all of which were used by the family. Japanese antique ornaments decorate the children's room upstairs.

In 1951, Koizumi's father, Takashi, who worked as an architectural engineer at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, designed and built the house for his wife and four daughters, borrowing money from the Housing Loan Corp., a public corporation established in 1949 to promote housing construction after the metropolitan area was devastated by air raids during World War II.

At that time, many people were still living in shacks due to a serious lack of construction materials. The housing loan corporation thus restricted the size of homes built with its financial help.

"My father came up with some ideas to reduce costs," said Koizumi, the eldest daughter. "For instance, instead of using 3-meter-long pillars on each floor, 4.5-meter-long wooden pillars that ran from the first through the second floor were used in some places. To support the house with fewer pillars, wooden beams were installed."

When her mother and the last sister moved out in 1996, Koizumi said she considered having it torn down.

"Although part of this house was reformed and extended, it has retained the original structure and was well maintained by my mother who liked cleaning the house," she said. "After I found out that only about 2 percent of the common houses built around 1950 remain, I thought our house would be valuable historically to reveal the lives of common people in those days."

The museum is currently holding a special exhibition, the result of a year of research by Koizumi and her students, featuring medical tools -- clinical thermometers, an inhaler, regular medicines and tools for childbirth -- that were used for home nursing during the early Showa period. Special exhibitions are held in a former room that was rented out to boarders.

Koizumi and other staffers also hold sessions to provide people with the chance to learn things as they were taught prior to the war, including how to make peanut butter.

The only major problem with running the museum, Koizumi said, is that she herself finances expenses for maintenance and personnel costs.

The museum is looking for volunteers such as gardeners, museum guides who speak foreign languages, and those who can teach housekeeping as it was done in the early Showa Era such, including the making of kimono and cooking.