The Interesting Quality Homogeneity of Japan’s Museums

In my previous blog about the best and worst museums I visited in Japan I mentioned that it was a real struggle and that the ‘winners and losers’ such as there are, were in a very subjective and technical sense.

Usually when I visit places there are standouts, something that awed me in its scale or execution. Alternatively something that hardly tries or fails spectacularly. But in Japan everything was… pretty good. Technically highly competent with evidence of solid programs and community involvement. But to some extent it made it almost boring.

Osaka History Museum

The interest then is in why so many museums including even very small local museums, and seemingly niche museums such as a sewage works are so good. With obviously modern displays and highly detailed dioramas and sets that rival the best of museums elsewhere?

We could of course make some kind of speculation about national character, pride in history and achievement etc. But whilst I have no doubt that this is true to an extent I’m wary of sticking my oar somewhere I have even less experience.

Ultimately I think there is a very simple answer, and it’s money. Running costs in Japan are very low (famously it’s why they can afford to make their trains so good) and yet people spend freely. The museums were busy at all times with a diverse mix of local seeming people, this included of course families and old people, school trips etc. But even after schools let out you could find small groups of school children choosing to hang out at the museums. Additionally whilst there people were happy to spend money on special tickets, small trinkets, food, and photograph opportunities.

Once again answering ‘why’ is probably beyond my capabilities but it is at least in part to do with the endless parade of special collaborations, promotions, and events. I’ve already waxed lyrical about the Pokemon Fossil Museum (They have a new astronomy one coming, i’m very excited), and the Animal crossing x Sealife Centre one, but across Japan it seemed that nearly every single place had a small collaboration on at any given time but only for a limited time so you have to come visit now!

Small Worlds

The second is slightly more speculative on my part but I feel is supported by the raft of Utility based museums such as the Gasworks Museum, Water Works, and two different Sewage Museums I visited (among others). And that’s that the various companies are simply willing to put more money out there for projects like museums.

Exactly why is again cultural but part of this comes from the Zaibatsu, family run mega corporations like Mistubishi that are simply enormous. This has led to a different corporate culture where the public image is highly significant and as well as less ‘enshitfication’ generally across Japan as well as lower prices it means that companies are happier to put money forward.

Rainbow Sewage Museum

Things are of course more complicated but I believe that fundamentally Japanese museums enjoy both a better commercialisation of their spaces and there is more access to money for keeping museums fresh. And given that money even the small and niche museums are able to bring themselves up to a higher standard.

What’s the learning from this then? That all museums should be given more money? Well… yes, obviously. But simply saying that isn’t helpful and nor do I expect that it will convince anyone that holds the purse strings.

Instead perhaps we should consider that worse museums are often so because they don’t have the budget and consider how we can work around this. And also look at how temporary events and collaborations can bring people back into the space beyond the normal cycle of exhibitions.

The Best and Worst Museums in Japan

Japan poses something of a problem when it comes to ‘Best’ and ‘Worst’. Namely that the delta on museum quality was surprisingly small. It didn’t matter if it was a national science museum, or a local sewage centre; basically every museum was up to a very high standard that used modern practice. And that’s across the 92 different places I managed to visit across my two week stay in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka!

As such, unlike with the previous versions of this series there wasn’t anything that stuck out as particularly terrible, nor actually as particularly amazing. This in itself is something of note and something I hope to consider further but the format demands some bests and worsts so I’m going to cheat and use it more to expound on some broader ideas than give a definitive answer.

The ‘Best’ - Toy Film Museum/Gas Science Museum

I have said before that one of the best museums I ever visited was one room in Estonia where a man told me about some coins. Nothing fancy or flashy, just an excellent guide with a great story to tell. The Toy Film Museum fits into this very mold.

The tucked away museum very much seemed to be a few rooms in the owner’s house. Upon entering I managed to surprise the poor lady, though she quickly recovered and ended up giving me an excellent tour of their collection of magic lanterns and happily chatted away for close to an hour about various things that they have been involved with and showing off an assortment of films.

Photo of part of the Magic Lantern Collection

The joy of a museum like the Toy Film museum is of course not truly in the structure of the museum itself. In many ways it is a collection of unlabeled artifacts and without a guide it would be almost meaningless. Instead it comes from the clear love and passion of the collections owner, the stories they can tell about each and every object and the things they are excited to show you.

Such an idea of course cannot be expanded to national museums or really anything beyond the very small because you could never reliably hire in a person with the same level of love. Which is why it’s always such a joy to find such a place. I’m now even featured on their blog so could hardly go without doing the same.

I will expound further in another blog about the existence of high quality ‘municipal’ museums but one that really stood out was the Tokyo Gas Science Museum. This was a place that despite my natural concerns about fossil fuels managed to genuinely get me (at least temporarily) excited about burning natural gas…

A gas lit lantern in the Gas Science Museum

No small part of this was likely caused by the fact that one of the exhibits gave me a small flame thrower which I could use to blast bubbles filled with flammable gas and other such fun activities that play on the primal urge of ‘Fire Good’. But it would be remiss of me to say that they did not also present a solid museum backing to the exhibits with a surprisingly balanced viewpoint.

Indeed there was a large exhibit dedicated to transitioning away from gas where possible, though how much of this is greenwashing is not something I could say without further exploration.

As alluded to at the start of this article there wasn’t anything particularly outstanding about this museum. It didn’t really do anything new or special, but I came away with genuinely new interest and knowledge on the topic which, having visited as many museums as I now have, is fairly infrequent.

The ‘Worst’ - Kyoto International Manga Museum/Art Aquarium Museum Ginza

Both of the ‘worst’ here are not bad. Not by any stretch. They are both well attended and put together so why are they here? The problem I think comes from the definition. Both of these places are not “museums” and thus do not meet the expectations that come from having that explicitly in their name. This is a slightly tricky prospect given there is a clear language and cultural barrier, but honestly otherwise I had basically no complaints so this is the best i’ve got.

The Kyoto International Manga Museum is not a museum. It’s a very fancy library with some exhibits, perhaps you could even call it an archive. This became clear almost immediately from both the ticket that allowed reentry (very rare in Japan) and the copious amounts of seating covered in people reading books.

The majority of the space in the old school building is covered in shelves and shelves of manga. All of which you are free to pick up and read at your leisure.

Some of the Archival Shelves in the Manga Museum

The space was busy, lots of people relaxing and reading. As mentioned there were also a few exhibits in a traditional sense. One with handcasts of manga artists, another on a particular series etc. But the space was first and foremost a library and was clearly used as such.

Again, this is by no means bad, it was very popular and perhaps if I was having a more leisurely time I could have used it as such. But this is the danger in using the name of a museum and the expectation that can set up.

Similarly on this theme Art Aquarium Museum which is in no way a museum. It’s an art gallery, and indeed it’s actually more of an Art ‘Experience’ which are increasingly common places similar to Dark Matter, teamLab, or any of dozens of similar attractions in major cities around the world. They’re put together by genuine artists yes, but foremost to be attractions that bring people in for experiences and instagram photos.

Once again this is by no means an invalid form of expression and is clearly a cut above the scourge of “selfie museums” that I've railed against before. But once again the use of the word museum sets up expectations here which go completely unmet.

One of the pieces in the Art Aquarium

The secondary issue here which should be raised is Japanese standards of animal welfare. This is once again a cultural difference so I need to be mindful of this but across the zoos, aquariums, reptile houses etc that I visited it was clear that animals are generally very poorly kept.

Across the board animals were kept in very small containers and showed clear stress behaviours. This was also especially true in the art aquarium. I will admit to not knowing much about fish and fish behaviour but it seemed clear that the fish were generally kept in very cramped and crowded conditions that were often pretty dirty.

The reason for this is fairly clear, in a zoo for example you could easily see whatever animal was in a pen and generally in motion. But you could see it because it was such a small area with nowhere to hide and the circling motion is generally a bad sign of stress.

I’m far from an animal campaigner and I generally give zoo’s etc a pass despite the potentially thorny ethical issues but I can’t deny that all of this left a bit of a sour taste in the mouth.

It Doesn’t Matter How Good Your Stuff Is If I Don’t Know What It Is

 There’s a fun little game they play on antiques roadshow; Good, Better, Best. The idea is they lay out three object, one worth something like £50, another a few hundred and one high value item reaching into the thousands. The joy of this of course is that you can’t really tell unless you’re an expert. And this is exactly the same in a museum.

One of these Sold for $16million, one for £15’000 and the other £150. Can you tell which?*

It’s possible to get all sorts of interesting tat in an antique shop but what’s valuable is hard to determine. Whilst price is not strictly speaking important to a museum an objects importance is.

This general idea has broadly been taken up by most museums these days that a roman oyster shell that was thrown away in great piles can be made more interesting than a painting worth tens of thousands of pounds depending on the story you tell around it.

This develops a simple idea that should be hammered home. The object in the museum is not important, it’s the story about it that is.

This leads to two major streams of thought, firstly how important are the objects themselves? This is a big theme of my work in museums made of replicas and museums with limited objects. But secondly how best to tell stories around the objects themselves.

As mentioned this is all well and good and basically everywhere except the oldest and least updated of collections generally understands this… So why for pity's sake are there still tons of museums out there that just display random stuff!

You’ll see this time and time again. A display case about… say… the Etruscans. And it gives a small amount of information saying they buried their dead, made pots etc. And then the cabinet is full of…. Stuff? 

We can make the logical link that the stuff is Etruscan and likely related to funerary rights or cooking. But it’s just 6 pots, a comb and some beads. The labelling is no better simply stating something like (Cooking Pot ~700BC). This is not helpful or useful. What is a visitor expected to do with this information? 

The short answer is that they can simply look at the pot. And perhaps if it is aesthetically pleasing they might take a photo. But that’s pretty much it. This problem is replicated across, basically most of a collection.

So how can we solve this? How can we make each item matter?

The simple yet difficult answer is to make a whole display around each individual item. I don’t think this is perhaps as crazy as it first sounds. If your items are just there to make up the numbers then why even have them at all? This naturally limits how many items you can display in a museum but focuses the mind on precisely what you're showing and why.

A more widespread possibility however is something like comparing groups of items. Rather than using a display that shows a bunch of Etruscan artifacts because they’re Etruscan instead we could show Italian pots over the course of the different people that lived there. Now using these items we’re showing a clear change over time and attendees are actively engaging with them as objects rather than simply looking at them.

The idea is simple in that for any given item on display an average punter should be able to quickly be able to identify exactly why that specific artifact has been chosen. Because there will be a reason, curators pour tons of effort into their choices and over the decades have sought out the best things they can.

Without its context the Rosetta Stone is just a rock and the Mona Lisa is just an old, kinda cracked painting. But that story is what leads literally hundreds of thousands of people a year to visit them.

An Etruscan Coin, the purpose of which will be revealed in the next section

By way of some example, one of the best museums I've ever been to was the (now sadly seemingly closed) Tallinn coin museum. It consisted of a single room with a set of drawers in the middle containing lots of different coins. The man running the place then asked me to pick a coin, any coin, and then told me a little tale about it. What it was, what were the circumstances around its creation and why it was important enough to be in his collection. In this way he made everything feel special.

There was no doubt a certain amount of sleight of hand here, perhaps there was a story or two for each drawer but the impression was clear. Each item had its place in the collection and I could know it by simply asking.

I don’t expect this idea to be done perfectly across every museum and item ever but I think when putting together an exhibit or assessing a collection we need to ask “Why is this object included, and can the visitors figure that out?”. 

 

*Left $16 Million, Middle £150, Right £15’000

 The best museum in the world (in my opinion, and from the perspective of a museum nerd) exists in Los Angeles behind a rather austere and unassuming facade. I was fortunate enough to visit it without really knowing what it was and with no expectations (and also after eating the best chicken i’ve ever had). I would recommend that you do the same if you can (the chicken was from Go Go Bird at the nearby Citizen Public Market). 

But given that popping over to America isn’t likely something to be done on a whim feel free to read on.

Image of the Front of The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Taken from Trip Advisor)

It was after a rather disastrous time working in the US a friend suggested that he’d come and visit and we could do a bit of a US tour. Doing a loop from San Francisco down to LA, across to Vegas and then back via Yosemite. Putting this trip together is actually where my spreadsheet and map system came from.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology was dutifully selected and honestly chosen for a visit because it had a cool name and was conveniently located on our way back from Santa Monica pier. Neither of us looked into it any more than that.

Stepping in through the rather dingy entrance and gift shop we then watched the introductory movie that was shown on a tiny black and white TV with a near incoherent narrator. I turned to my friend and asked “Have we come to another cult museum?”

What followed was a whirlwind of exhibits; one on a middle ranking American physicist and his affair with a moderately famous opera singer, a room of trailer art, the medieval bestiary staircase, the library with nothing but books about Napoleon, the portrait gallery of soviet cosmonaut dogs and so on and so on ending at the top with a Turkish garden complete with free tea and an aviary.

Both in the description here and in actuality it is a wild mess of a place where you don’t know what’s coming next that makes it an absolute delight.

A picture of the medieval bestiary staircase (Taken from Trip Advisor)

What this all means and what’s going on is much like a piece of art somewhat open to interpretation. However to me the central thrust is fairly simple. It’s a museum about museums. What museums are, how they function, and most importantly what we choose to display in them.

In the museum the question is asked “Why should we have a display on Victorian theatre equipment?” but rather “Why not?” which it then promptly does to the exact same standard as any exhibit in any good museum.

It’s asking very important questions that we rarely stop to consider. What are we displaying and why are we displaying it? I would expand on this idea but in many ways that is exactly what the rest of this blog and my continued work with museums is. This equally is the turning point where I really started to get into museum and museum design after seeing what they can be.

So, to that end I would encourage anyone who is going to be anywhere near to make the trip to see what a museum can be in order to consider what they could be.

Please Don’t Make Me Use Your App

I have a contentious relationship with my phone at the best of times. Admittedly I'm fairly cheap so I tend to have older phones with a fairly limited data package. This means that it fills me with nothing but dread when a museum pushes that I should really download their app.

On the face of it it makes perfect sense. Why go through the expense of audio guides when everyone has a device in their pocket that can already do that.

Apps can also do so much more, you can stock as much information as you want on there including videos, interactive elements, links and resources. All of which can of course be accessed without actually being at the museum at all. The possibilities are endless.

Image of The MET App (Taken from Museum Strategy)

The problem is that your app isn't like that at all*. Firstly the Internet won't be up to snuff meaning that it will take forever to download and the pictures and videos won't really load. The information blocks to any particular exhibit also don't really tell me anything the plaque doesn't already and there nothing about that one artifact in really interested in.

There is technically the full museum catalogue available to me, but it's little more than a list of items titles with obvious descriptions and an identification number. Plus when I click to try and find out more the webpage it links me to is broken.

The story behind these apps is generally the same. At some point somebody important decided an app should be made and they allocated an amount of money that was too small to hire somebody who did it in a month and then it's hardly been touched since.

The problem is that apps are not something you can set and forget like information cards in a display. They are living things that need time, effort, and more money than most people expect. Otherwise the impression is that of an interactive space where half the exhibits have a paper ‘out of order’ sign.

A museum app can be a genuinely useful and transformative tool that adds enormous value. But to get to that point you need a fully dedicated app team that is probably outside the scope of all but the largest of institutions.

There is definitely potential for an ‘app first’ museum model perhaps with exciting missions objectives, personalized guided tours etc. This is the kind of thing being spearheaded by immersive experiences such as Phantom Peak but we need to be careful not to end up relying on the app that ends up non-functional.

This is perhaps a great use case for AI. I'm personally not an advocate for AI but within the controlled and limited environment of a museum and with a model that has been trained on the collection (and somehow made not to constantly lie) the idea of a personal AI museum tour guide ala Dan Brown's Origin is a possibility. But perhaps let's not get ahead of ourselves with that idea just yet.

* I mean, your app might be. But chances are it’s not.

Dragon Quest, David Hasselhoff, and Jurassic Technology

Earlier this week I led a discussion at the Association for Science and Discovery Centres’ 2025 Conference. Marking the 25th anniversary of the organisation they chose to focus the event around ‘the next 25 years’ asking what could and should change.

It might be no surprise then that in my session I chose to lead a session encouraging people to take their ideas to the absolute extreme and think of the wildest and craziest thing they could possibly do as a way of trying to break down boundaries.

The session focused around three particular places which I feel each offer a different potential for the future as well as my beloved Museum of Jurassic Technology which I promise I will wax lyrical about one day.

Pokémon Fossil Museum

I won’t say too much about the Pokémon Fossil Museum here as I've already done an entire blog on it. But I think that crossover events such as this and the Sealife Centre X Animal Crossing are a great way to draw in a crowd that might not normally attend.

This needs to be done consciously, in a world where fortnight crossovers are commonplace to kids it can be exciting but we need to be careful to not throw out the baby with the bathwater and lose any actual context or educational use.

David Hasselhoff Museum

In the basement of a hotel in Berlin is a tiny one room museum dedicated to David Hasselhoff. It contains a few artifacts such as Baywatch Merchandise and assorted photographs. There is also a scatter collection of ‘Hoff Facts’ about his life and career.

All in all it’s actually not a very good museum and could do with a bit more story telling and coherent themes. But it offers a different way of looking at things. Why should museums only exist as large institutions that you go out of your way to visit? Why not have lots of small educational spaces dotted around that you can stumble across as part of your regular day to day.

Image of the Inside of the David Hasselhoff Museum (Image from Wikipedia)

Dragon Quest Island

I’m excited about immersive experiences and new tech. I’ve worked on digital and VR museum projects before and think there’s a lot we can do with learning spaces.

Perhaps one of the most developed of these experiences that doesn’t rely overwhelmingly on staff is the Dragon Quest Island in Japan. It uses a system of RFID chips and a central computer to allow you to walk around a fantasy village based on the hugely popular video game franchise.

Entrance to Dragon Quest Island (Taken from Awaji Resort)

This allows you to interact with the various screens placed around the park to battle and level up, you can find objects in the physical environment and then ‘pick them up’ by using your RFID wristband which then makes them available in future battles.

This kind of tech is being tried out in lots of new and interesting ways i’d love to explore but one of the key ones that i’ve seen within a museum context was in the Berlin Global. Here guests were given a wristband and when walking between rooms in the museum had to make a choice about which door to walk through where each was an answer to some question such as “I value security over freedom” or “I value freedom over security”. This was recorded onto the wristband and would then be printed out at the end.

These are just a few possibilities for where museums could go in the future and to me they form a part of mixed tapestry of potential. I don’t know what the future will look like but i’m hoping that it will be interesting.

The Best and Worst Museum(s) in Dublin

Taking a little summer break I went to visit Dublin for a few days, and of course to rifle through its various museums. Bucking the convention of how this is supposed to work I will be featuring two museums for both best and worst for what I hope will become obvious reasons.

The Best - Guinness Storehouse/National Leprechaun Museum

It should perhaps not be a surprise that the highest rated and most touted museum in all of Dublin was the best. But it still kind of was. Part art museum, part brew tour, part collection gallery the Guinness storehouse offers a simple and enjoyable experience for just about anyone.

The famed Guinness Storehouse Gates (Taken from ireland.com)

Spread over several floors the museum starts with a brief description of the ingredients and brewing of Guinness which is largely described through assorted art installations. A field of wheat, a rather nifty water curtain that is able to display words and images. It all fits together fairly well, getting across the key ideas in a fairly novel way. It hits well on Instagram-able moments and would to many have the effect of a modern art gallery. From here you climb up to a more traditional set of exhibits about how Guinness changed over the years including the making of barrels, transportation throughout the world and its famed advertising.

Part way through this there is also a tasting experience which expounds on some of the flavours and offers the drinking in a Victorian-themed drinking room.

Of course, at the top there is then a bar where your ticket gets you a free pint of Guinness or (if you’re like me and just the taster was plenty to let you know you don’t like it) a soft alternative. There are also a variety of eateries and additional tasting experiences for an additional fee.

In some ways the Guinness Storehouse doesn’t do anything particularly special. But it does it on such a grand size and scale, whilst doing it all so well that it truly is a fantastic visit. That’s not to say there aren't plenty of bits to pick at. The information that’s provided about nearly everything is pretty lacklustre, though this potentially works to its advantage as it keeps you moving at a reasonable pace. Additionally the whole place has a heavy hand of corporate propaganda for which your tolerance may vary.

Giving the best museum to the Guinness alone however feels a bit like a sports movie where the winning team is the favourites who have all the money, training facilities, and significantly larger players. So I wanted to at least share this spotlight with the National Leprechaun Museum.

Image from one of the rooms in the National Leprechaun Museum (Taken from National Leprechaun Museum)

A leprechaun museum could very well be a cheap cash grab. Throw in some gaudy statues, a couple plaques about the origins of the folk tales, and then whatever art and knickknacks you can find and call it a day. So whilst originally trepidatious I was delighted to say that the National Leprechaun museum was very much not that!

It’s not a traditional museum as such but rather a guided set of story telling. Moving between four different themed rooms your guide tells you a series of traditional folk tales. One set that’s family suitable and another more adult/horror themed set on select evenings.

This is such a simple setup that I’m kind of surprised I’ve never really seen it done quite this way before, and even though the tales were somewhat childish (I saw the normal daytime showing) they remained an absolute delight, delivered by an excellent guide.

The main disappointment was that whilst the sets were pleasant they were pretty much static. It likely wouldn’t take much to add things like triggerable sound effects, changing lighting, or maybe the odd item that moves to really add a sense of space to the stories being told.

Overall both of these museums are well worth your time if you’re visiting and I recommend booking ahead for both as they both sell out pretty quick. 

The Worst - The Irish Famine Exhibition/The Irish Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum Experience

I often wrestle with what it means to be the best or the worst. In Poland it was a place that squandered its opportunity, Berlin about relying on technology but then not following through, and Amsterdam about something more masquerading as a museum than actually being one. But in Dublin it was just a plain bad museum classic.

The Irish Famine Exhibition was tucked away on the top floor of a half abandoned and fairly grotty shopping centre which whilst in theory a good idea wasn’t a great look. Upon actually getting to the exhibit I was greeted with bland posterboard stories placed around in an otherwise fairly empty room.

Image features in the Irish Famine Exhibition, there are no pictures of it for obvious reasons. (Taken from myguidedublin)

There is no one particular terrible thing about the exhibit. No grand lies, dreadful pieces or misleading placements but it’s just incredibly dull. The text and image on the poster boards are functional but uninspired. It’s possible to take away the facts of the experience but hardly the story.

It feels like an exhibit plucked from the pre-2000s and carries all the sensibilities of such. So whilst it’s perhaps not ‘bad’ in the way some of others have been it does have a complete lack of ‘good’ that earns it this spot.

Right before the end of my trip this was the clear winner of the worst museum but then the final place I visited was the Irish Rock ‘n’ Roll Experience. 

Image of the Inside of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum (Taken from Viator)

The place wasn’t off to a great start when I realised it shared a ticket with the Wax Work place but heading down there was a corridor filled with a variety of records, guitars and the kind of thing you’d expect to see.

The tour guide (it’s a guided tour only) started telling tales about the rock legends that have passed through the facilities halls. Those that have played in the upstairs venue, how U2 rented out one of the practice rooms before they made it big.

He seemed like a nice enough guy but he utterly bored me to tears. I’ll write some day about the gamble that is guided tours but this guy was possibly the worst I’ve ever come across. I can’t pinpoint exactly why, nor do I think the others there were as off put as I was. But after about 40 minutes when he indicated that there was plenty more to see I did something I'd never done before, and simply left. 

This is possibly not a fair reflection on either the tour guide or museum. But it did happen and I've endured through some pretty terrible guided tours before so I think it still deserves the title of shared worst.