Osaka Natural History Museum

Right now I'm in the middle of "Golden Week", a roughly week long chain of holidays that everyone has off work. Trains are a lot more crowded and so is pretty much anywhere you'd want to go. Nevertheless, on Thursday I went to the natural history museum in Osaka. They have a temporary exhibit with dinosaurs that has been advertised a lot.

Although the temporary exhibit itself was pretty good (though short), the museum was a bit of a let down. To be fair, the main part of the museum was free and the exhibit wasn't particularly expensive by Japanese standards. But I continue to be surprised at the relatively low quality of Japan's museums. Osaka is the second largest city in Japan, but this museum (with the possible exception of the special exhibit) paled in the comparison to even the University of Iowa natural history museum. Mostly it was insects, which was okay, but more comparable to the small museum locked away in the upstairs of my dad's office in Coe than to a world class city's museum.

I remember going to the natural history museum in Prague and seeing whale bones hanging up on the ceiling. Prague is thousands of miles from the ocean, but they still managed somehow to get a whale skeleton there. Japanese eat whales, but there weren't any animals larger than a raccoon at this museum (actually it was a 'tanooki', but similar to a raccoon).

One thing I did like was the way they used lights on the skeletons. One (the first one here) was done really well, while the others could have been better. I think they were limited in their abilities to use the light because of the confined space for the special exihibit. Anyway, here are some pictures:





The only large stuffed mammal I saw was in an elementary school. A lot of the kids in my town where bells on their bags to scare away bears, though I think they're pretty rare now. One was at some point killed, stuffed, and given to one of my schools. I don't know why, but they keep it in a stairwell that goes up to the roof, hidden behind some billboards. It surprised me the first time I saw it. I think it would be better displayed at the main entrance to the school.