Museums of Japan

About this book

173 museums — the complete guide to Japan's museums you can read on Kindle. 2026 edition.

Japan is one of the great museum countries of the world — this is the guide that proves it.

From the Tokyo National Museum, founded in 1872 and still the anchor of Japan's museum system, to castle museums inside surviving keeps, a battleship preserved as a floating museum, railway museums built around full-size locomotives, the peace museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and single-room collections devoted to one craft, one poet or one local industry — this guide covers 173 of Japan's museums in full, organised by region from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

Each chapter gives you the complete story: what the museum is, its history, its buildings and its collections, plus the essential facts at a glance — museum type, city and prefecture, year opened, nearest station, coordinates and the official website. The selection is drawn from a verified database of more than 4,400 Japanese museums and includes every museum for which a full in-depth English account exists: all the national museums, the great art and history museums, and dozens of specialist museums that most guidebooks never mention.

Whether you are planning a museum journey across Japan or exploring from your armchair, this is the most complete single-volume English guide to Japan's museums.

Inside: 173 chapters in eight regional parts · 275 licensed photographs with full credits · original introduction and museum guide · a practical chapter on visiting museums in Japan · glossary of Japanese museum terms.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.