Info-Forum Museum（Before March 2022）

In the coastal area of Japan, there remain temples, shrines, and stone monuments which evoke memories of disasters caused by earthquakes and tsunamis. These cultural heritage sites and monuments remind us of the disasters in the past. Taking inspiration from the experiences of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we have created a database for the people living in the Japanese islands to provide information on temples, shrines, stone monuments, and inscription plates using maps and data. The database also has a feature where new information can be added by its users. We would like to develop this database with the help of the residents of the coastal area and anyone interested in this project. As a databank of cultural heritage sites related to tsunamis, we hope this database will help people prepare for disasters in the future.

This is the database for the “Gangu oyobi kanren seso shiryo”, aka the “Jidai Gangu collection”, which was donated to the National Museum of Ethnology in March 2013. Designated by Osaka Prefecture as a tangible folk cultural property, the Jidai Gangu collection is a collection of toys and materials from the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa and early Heisei eras. It was amassed by collector Toshikatsu Tada from 1975 onwards through visits to flea markets and old houses from Hokkaido to Tanegashima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture, and is one of the top toy collections in the country.

This database features a selection of the National Museum of Ethnology’s Middle Eastern and West Asian artifacts. It is comprised of materials related to the nomadic society of the Arabian Peninsula collected by Motoko Katakura (Professor Emeritus at the National Museum of Ethnology), folk art from modern Iran collected by Jay Gluck, and a collection of items related to coffee amassed by Yukitoshi Shimegi.

This database, compiled from basic information of cultural resources related to Indigenous Peoples in Alaska (USA), Canada, and Greenland, has as many as about 3,000 objects stored by the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan.

This database catalogues the collections displayed at the “Culture of Japan” exhibition in the main hall of the National Museum of Ethnology.
It allows users to search the collections under two data categories; materials and exhibition.

This database provides information on about 3,000 objects in the ethnographical collection of the Rev. Doctor George Brown, a pioneering Methodist missionary in the Pacific Islands from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. In 1985 and 1986, the National Museum of Ethnology purchased the George Brown Collection from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

This database has been published as the result of a project to survey and research artifacts related to Taiwan, and allows users to browse and search for items in Japanese, Chinese and English. Comprised mainly of everyday household items, clothing and crafts, the database features a free text search function and an index of indigenous ethnic group and artifact names. This is to encourage and enable use of the database by the general public and members of the source community, as well as scholars involved with research into indigenous ethnic groups. The interface has been designed to allow users to browse and search the database on smart phones and tablets. The aim of this is to support use on portable devices, which are expected to develop further in the future.

※ For the time being, IDs and passwords will only be assigned to authorized persons.
This database aims to compile video recordings of the folk performing arts handed down in Tokunoshima for use in transmission and research. The video recordings were made between 2010 and 2016 with the cooperation of residents and governments of Tokunoshima, Isen and Amagi. By clicking on an interactive map, users can view the folk performing arts from each community, and landscapes and stories about them that give insight into Tokunoshima’s environment and history.

The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka possesses a collection of ethnographic objects, about 21,000 in number, received in 1975 from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Education (now integrated to the National Institute of Japanese Literature). The accumulation of this collection started in the 1910s under the initiative of SHIBUSAWA Keizo, who served as Japan’s first Minister of Finance after World War II and as President of Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. Ltd. (now KDDI). This collection has been expanded while being passed into the hands of various organizations, such as the Attic Museum, led by Shibusawa, and the Japanese Society of Ethnology (now the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology). Because the collection materialized into its final form at the museum attached to the Japanese Society of Ethnology in Hoya (now Nishi-Tokyo), Tokyo, we named it “Hoya Museum” Collection.