Nihon Minkaen Audio Tour

The Nihon Minkaen Audio Tour Application is available in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean.
This guide provides soothing narrations along with beautiful photographs of the Edo-period houses that have been moved here from their original sites. The guide has floor plans for each house, photographs of the house before its relocation to the open-air museum. The entire vocal tracks with their texts and figures for the audio-guide are available and can be enjoyed from home as a lively catalogue of folk houses.

Nihon Minkaen
With the rapid vanishing of pre-modern traditional Japanese Folk Houses, the Nihon Minkaen was established in 1967 aiming to hand down arts of these buildings to the future generations. The museum preserves representative residences specific to Eastern Japan, such as gasshō-zukuri, houses with steep gabled roofs, and Nanbu magariya, L-shaped houses. There are twenty-five cultural assets representing a wide selection of indigenous architectures, including the water mill, the ferryman’s hut, the storehouse on stilts, and the kabuki theatre. The Japanese government has designated seven of these architectures as Important Cultural Properties, while the others are also Cultural Properties. The quality and number of these properties makes this Museum one of Japan’s leading folk house museums.