"Between the Old and the New"
      Japan has a history of simultaneously preserving the old while moving speedily into modernization, but as this dual approach has been going strong for about 140 years now, what has happened is there are whole generations of missing culture between 1860 and 2003!  The problem is that while new things are enormously popular when they are new, as they grow old, they fall between the really old things that are preserved as important aspects of Japan's cultural heritage, and the new stuff that is popular and exciting but never considered to be "cultural", and so it is destroyed when it shows signs of aging.  It was thus a happy discovery for me to visit the Edo-Tokyo Building Museum, where they have taken several middle-culture buildings (the actual buildings themselves, not replicas) from different parts of Tokyo, moved them to a section of a very large park, and basically built a small city of them there.  The execution of this concept has been rather well done - with the buildings not only being intact, but with residential houses furnished and stores stocked with authentic merchandise from a few decades ago.
BetweenOld&New by Lyle H Saxon
What took me out that way for my second visit, was a display of the original artwork for the "anime" (Japanese term originally based on the English word "animation") movie "Spirited Away" ("Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi"), by Hayao Miyazaki.  Apparently he modeled some of the buildings in that anime movie after buildings at the outdoor museum's recreated city, and so they held the exhibition of his artwork and kept the "city" open much later than usual with people manning the stores and even the drinking place.  As the buildings are in fact the real thing (not replicas), and are wired for electricity and stocked with authentic period furniture and merchandise, it all seems quite real.

About the image
All of the photos were taken on the same evening, with the green one first, taken on the way to the park, the sky one next, just before going inside the park, and the other four corner pictures taken within the park.  In the top left photo, the building in the center is the bath house (public bath), that features so prominently in the movie (the one in the movie is about twice as high, but the style was modeled on the one in the picture at the end of the street).                                  Copyright 2003 - Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo