The abandoned Sea Shell Museum was on the top of my list of places to visit for quite a while – here is what I found when I finally made it there…
It’s always dangerous if you let your imagination fill the blanks of missing information as it tends to use the most positive outcome possible, while reality tends to do… the opposite – all you online daters out there know what I mean!
About three years ago I first saw the abandoned Sea Shell Museum on a Japanese blog and I was fascinated! There were only a handful of photos, but they looked amazing… and outside pictures of the building made it look gigantic, so I imagined it to be much like the *Takeshima Fantasy Museum*, an active sea shell museum in the outskirts of Nagoya – at first I even thought it was the exact same place as it was closed for a few years between 2010 and 2014.
Phew, was I wrong! Not only was the abandoned Sea Shell Museum in a different part of Japan (which I found out after about 1.5 years…), it was also much smaller and a lot less colorful (which I learned the hard way another 1.5 later – yes, it took me that long to find a reasonable way to explore that damn thing!). While the Takashima Fantasy Museum features a vast area of colorful and imaginative seal shell sculptures, the abandoned Sea Shell Museum only had a rather small display… which wasn’t that colorful. Both places have a museum part, which are about the same size, but make up for about 10% of the space at the Fantasy Museum and a whopping 90% of the space at the Sea Shell Museum. Objectively not bad at all, unique and super interesting actually, but not what I had dreamed up in my mind based on the photos I first saw. Expectations are the worst – never have them! They are barely ever surpassed, only mildly satisfying when fulfilled, and more often than not you set yourself up for disappointments…
Opened in 1973 and in business till the late 00s the now abandoned Sea Shell Museum was on the second and third floor of a rest stop by the sea, while the first floor was used as a restaurant and omiyage shop. Now the whole building is decaying rapidly, despite the lack of blatant vandalism – there is some, but surprisingly little, considering that the place isn’t exactly the secret anymore it was three years ago.
I was hoping for a Top 20 location, but the abandoned Sea Shell Museum would have a hard time to even make it on my Top 200 list. It was still a good location, but the whole exploration was rushed, the museum was much smaller and less artistic than expected… and the mix of dark corners, bright light coming in through a few openings, and reflective display surfaces made the whole place kinda hard to shoot. Overall the *abandoned sex museums I’ve visited* were much more interesting – and a lot of *abandoned schools* had similar items left behind. Add the time and effort (borderline hassle) involved in exploring this admittedly unusual museum, and I’m sure you’ll understand that I’m glad that I was able to finally cross it off my (relatively short) list of famous places to explore. A revisit is highly unlikely though, so please enjoy the following gallery.
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Abandoned Kansai 
Those poor corals left to die in the tanks. The wooden screen in the last picture looks stunning.
Welcome to Japan! 😦
cool :). the expectations vs reality thing is very true. it reminds me, years ago i used to walk by a very nice car, tastefully modified in period correct fashion, nice color etc, i really liked it. much later, i got an opportunity to buy this car, for very cheap too, so obviously i bought it right away without much thinking, barely even checking it lol. ofcourse it turned out the car is rotten pile of junk, with half dead engine, and about all of the aftermarket parts were somehow broken and unfixable. ended up stripping the remaining parts that were actually useable, and scrapping the rest, completely disapointed, lmao.
Darn, I hope you didn’t sink too much money into that!
The Sea Shell Museum was still a good visit though. 100 people could have told me that it would be disappointing, but some things you have to find out for yourself – and that darn thing is so remote that I jumped on the first opportunity to get there. Especially since the building is in really bad condition – it could be demolished or even collapse at any time.
yeah haha.
i actually made a slight profit on it after all, as i sold some of the parts i kept later, so atleast something haha
Nice visit. Why no external photos Florian ?
Thanks a lot, Ian!
The Shell Museum was definitely an indoor location, external photos wouldn’t have added much to the article – in cases like that they are only useful to lurkers, and I’m tired of feeding those scavengers.
Oof, this hurts my heart. Why weren’t these specimens donated to another museum, or at least sold to shell collectors? If there’s enough passion to build an entire museum based on a subject, where’s the will to take care of the specimens when it’s closed down?
I don’t know the exact reasons in this case, but a lot of museums in Japan are more like roadside attractions run by amateurs that can be anything from a room in somebody’s house to large facilities run by religious groups who spent the equivalent of tens of millions of US dollars.
Thanks, those are diverse reasons to have museums (or public curio collections)! The existence and eventual extinction of these places seems like a strange intersection of private whim and public front.