Inuyama Artifacts Museum

In detail

The city of Inuyama is one of the few places in Japan where the legacy of a castle town has been so well preserved. An estimated 2,000 castles were dismantled or destroyed during the modernization movement of the Meiji era (1868–1912) when Japan’s castles were viewed as symbols of an outdated, feudal era.

The Shirotomachi Museum keeps Inuyama’s history alive and provides a sense of what life was like when the town was flourishing during the Edo period (1603–1868). Its displays tell the story of the elite samurai class and ordinary citizens alike.

The museum’s main feature is a large diorama of the castle town as it was around 1840. The diorama showcases many buildings, gates, and walls that no longer exist, providing an accurate depiction of the original castle complex. The town is still configured in the same grid-like pattern and the main street looks much the same today as it did in the Edo period, densely lined with narrow merchant’s buildings.

Treasures passed down through generations of the Naruse family, longtime owners of Inuyama Castle, are on display in Exhibition Room 1. Exhibits showing the lives and folk traditions of people who lived in the Inuyama castle town are on display in Exhibition Room 2. The items on display in both rooms change periodically.