Back to Tokyo 2010

I couldn't manage without a Japanese post in my series to celebrate 500 posts and found that I hadn't shared this one from my brief visit to Tokyo in 2010, so, here goes with:

My Visit to Japan - Part 9

When we had a short visit to Tokyo on our way home from New Zealand in May 2010 we decided to explore the area near to our ryokan rather than try to belt about "doing" the whole country.  We had very quickly agreed that we would be returning to this marvellous country as soon as funds permitted and so this wasn't a see all and end all visit.  This resulted in us visiting small places that we might not have noticed if we'd been trying to "do" all the major attractions.  One such place was the Taiko Drum Museum, just a decent length walk from Ryokan Sawanoya at 6-1-15 Asakusa.
There are over 600 drums in the museum's collection with about 200 on display at any one time.  The drums are from all over the world and of a wonderful range of ages.  There are coloured dots on the drums with a red dot meaning "Don't touch" but most of the drums can be played although of course you need to take particular care with some (blue dot).
Al is more of a musician than I am and enjoyed playing a variety of drums but we were both very interested in the decoration and design of the instruments, making them such beautiful items.

For lots more information can I send you to http://theartofthedrum.blogspot.com/2007/10/drum-museum-tokyo.html ? Jesse has written an amazingly detailed post on his visit to the Drum Museum in 2007. 

We had an interesting conversation with a lovely member of the family who own the drum business, Miyamoto Unosuke Shoten and she kindly took photographs of us in the museum and gave us some postcards as souvenirs.  I was very impressed at another example of a Japanese person taking time to explain to a non-Japanese speaking English tourist with patience and graciousness.