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.