National Showa Memorial Museum

The Showa-kan in Tokyo's Kudanshita district, a few hundred metres from the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, opened in 1999 with a mandate to document the everyday life of Japanese citizens during and after the Pacific War. The narrow building, clad in horizontal aluminium louvres, looks closed from outside; inside a spiral leads through seven floors. The permanent exhibition on the sixth and seventh floors displays about 350 ordinary objects: ration tickets, mended school uniforms, aluminium pots, a life-size air-raid shelter and diaries from the hunger years of 1944 to 1948. The museum deliberately avoids the question of political or military responsibility, which critics argue lets the war be told purely as something that happened to Japanese civilians. In the reading room visitors can listen to Showa-era newsreels and radio recordings.