The National Museum of Ethnology (founded in 1974 and opened to the public in 1977) is a comprehensive Research Museum with about 60 academic researchers specializing in Ethnology and related fields.  It hosts an extensive collection of artifacts, some 255,000 in total, from all over the world.  Of these, about 12,000 items are on display in the regular exhibition.  In addition, the Museum has a wide range of electronic, audio-visual and printed materials as part of its library holdings.  One of the main focuses of the Museum has been to provide the general public with accurate and updated information about various societies around the world, in order to facilitate understanding of peoples with different cultural backgrounds living together in the modern world.  In Japanese, the National Museum of Ethnology is referred to as “Minpaku”.