Taito City is a rich cultural area, attracting craftsmen and merchants through the ages. It has Ueno Park, which was once the precincts of Kaneiji Temple, the family temple of the Tokugawa shoguns, and opened as a park in 1876, the Ueno area, a cultural center with many museums, and Sensoji Temple, which is said to have been founded as a temple dedicated to Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy. Therefore, Taito City has a variety of regional characteristics. The city, nurtured by the history and tradition, possesses culture as diverse social assets, and is still developing as a representative area in Japan. In addition to the continually changing modern face, the city also has an atmosphere of the Edo Period and moods of Meiji, Taisho and Showa Periods. This succession and handing down of culture have recently become an important issue/mission for local revitalization.

This website was created as part of the joint project between Taito City and the Institute of Media Design, Waseda University, (led by director Ikuro Choh) in order to document, preserve and hand down these valuable cultural assets. A digital archive created on the internet and computer has excellent stability, and can make the data cross-searchable and open to the public both at home and abroad. Using these characteristics, this website strives to promote the succession of the culture, which is seen as vanishing social assets, and aims to further enrich the contents.

Taito City
Institute of Media Design, Waseda University