Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum

The Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum is a free museum in the Sumida area, built in 1931 to commemorate the Kanto Earthquake of 1923. With the additional devastation that Tokyo suffered in air raids during WW2, the museum now has exhibits covering both of those tragedies. For a free museum, I thought it was rather interesting! However I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit here, and maybe it can be tacked on with a visit to the nearby Edo-Tokyo Museum or Hokusai Museum. The first floor covers the earthquake. Many people died due to widespread fires that broke out (the earthquake occurred around midday, when everyone had the fire on preparing lunch), but even worse, many Koreans were massacred due to misinformation that spread in the general panic after the earthquakes (geez). I know only a sparse amount of Japan’s history so I didn’t really know about this, but my husband did tell me that this is something he learned (albeit maybe only briefly) while at school. Although there are…