A rainy day in the Koto, and how many gently-smiling, dripping Jizo sculptures in their sodden red bonnets and bibs can one bear? What to do, what to do — until I discovered that there was a chunk of late Edo in a nondescript warehouse.

Actually, no, I was simply trying to write something clever. I had the Fukagawa Edo Museum bookmarked for a rainy day in Tokyo; so it is and so here we are.

The museum consist of a few streets of seaside Tokugawa Shogunate-era Low City astonishingly conjured up behind the beige walls and under the naked steel roof framing of an indeterminate 80’s hanger-like building on Fukagawashiryokan-dori. Walking through this simulated seaside village and across the spare tatami-floored rooms of the little houses, my mind kept returning to a conversation I once had with an New York-educated Japanese friend, who told me how amazed he was that U.S. considered itself a future-oriented society. “Everything just seemed so old there! There just isn’t anything like that in Tokyo. We don’t have a past like that.” Obviously, about four decades ago some Tokyoites decided to do something about it, and thus set out to painstakingly recreate a portion of the Shogunal city — with the reproduction conceived as a sort of perpetual-twilight terrarium.

Even though the museum seems infrequently visited and more than a bit dated, this is not to imply that it isn’t an earnest undertaking on the part of the staff. An enthusiastic roving historian carrying a clipboard covered with rough figures and jotted English translations that I encountered near the “harbor pilot’s house” was perfectly happy to discuss with me a wild range of historical details, from techniques for fireproofing the kura storehouse (burnt shell plaster and persimmon-peel tannin) to the shared footwear preference of sword-wielding samurai and fishermen (bare-heel half-sandals, apparently).

Of course, there is something more than a little David-Lynch-uncanny in this strange bubble of another time. I could almost imagine louche Showa-era aliens using this arrangement to run awkward sociological experiments on a group of kidnapped 19th-century Shitamachi families in a recreated habitat. But the fishermen and merchants of Edo are gone and it’s just a handful of bewildered tourists like myself wandering the facsimile of their narrow lanes.