Momotaro Karakuri Museum Kurashiki

In a storehouse lane of Kurashiki’s beautiful old canal quarter, the Momotaro Karakuri Museum celebrates Japan’s most famous folk hero with optical tricks, vintage toys and a healthy disregard for museum solemnity. Momotaro, the boy born from a peach who tamed ogres, is Okayama’s local legend, and this is his funhouse.

Tricks, toys and ogres

The karakuri of the name are mechanical and visual tricks: illusion rooms, peep box scenes and hands on gadgets in the Edo tradition of playful engineering, mixed with cases of Momotaro toys, books and advertising spanning a century of the legend’s pop culture life. A dark ogre’s cave passage supplies giggly scares for children, and the museum’s guides famously ham it up, language barrier notwithstanding. It is small, cheap by attraction standards and twenty times more charming than its size suggests.

Part of the Bikan quarter

The museum sits in the Bikan Historical Quarter, Kurashiki’s postcard district of white walled storehouses along a willow lined canal, alongside the celebrated Ohara Museum of Art and lanes of craft shops. Together they make Kurashiki one of western Japan’s most satisfying strolling towns.

Getting there

Kurashiki Station is fifteen minutes from Okayama by the JR San-yo Line, and Okayama is a Sanyo Shinkansen stop; the Bikan quarter is a ten to fifteen minute walk south of the station through the shopping arcades.

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