A general overview of historical artifacts can be found at the National Museum of Japanese History, while an important museum in Nagoya houses the treasures of the Tokugawa Art Museum. 

Nearby, visitors can find one of Japan's most interesting outdoor museums, Meiji Mura, an imposing collection of structures which can provide lots of insights into the ways in which the Japanese adapted Western architectural styles to their own uses in the late nineteenth century. 

Photographs taken by Takatori Kazutami highlight interior views of another Meiji era structure, the Takatori House, built in the early 1900s in Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. Here the Western influences throughout are obvious but so, too, is the ability of the Japanese builders involved to blend these borrowed motifs into a traditional architectural setting. 

The Kanto plain, which includes Nara, Osaka and Kyoto, has numerous historical sites, many arranged along a series of Japanese "History Highways" allowing you to "touch the spirit of Japan". 

Janet and James Goodwin have combined forces with others at the University of Aizu in Fukushima Prefecture to begin constructing an on-line history of Japan using locations, institutions and local historical figures as illustrations of larger forces at work in the Japanese past. This "living electronic history of Aizu" is still in its infancy but already has in place a 3D Virtual Tour of the Main Hall of Enichiji, a local Buddhist temple complex, plus an enlightening discussion on the estate system of land control, an examination of a architecturally fascinating pagoda at Sazaedo and an introduction to (and evaluation of) of a local tale involving the martyrdom of nineteen young samurai warriors in 1868. The treatment here is more scholarly than that found on many other sites but very much worth the visit. 

Huis ten Bosch, also on the southern-most island of Kyushu (near Sasebo), attempts to recreate the ambiance of Holland at the time of the first Dutch encounter with Japan during the late sixteenth century -- which makes for some more interesting contrasts between traditional forms of architecture, East and West.