ABSTRACT
On 25 May 1959, Iwamoto Shinichirô, the incoming mayor of the city of Takayama, in northern Gifu prefecture, approached the local potter, painter, and folklorist Nagakura Saburô with a request.1 Nagakura had been chosen by Iwamoto’s predecessor to lead in the establishment of a folklore museum just outside the city center. Like the Takayama Kyôdo-kan, a local history and culture museum that had run deficits for all the six years of its administration, the folklore museum was to be administered from the city’s education department. Iwamoto wanted to make sure that during his tenure the new museum would serve as a catalyst to draw tourism money to the city, rather than being a drain on its resources. The official history of the folklore museum reports that Nagakura agreed
to Iwamoto’s request, promising to do all he could to run it at a profit-with the mayor’s agreement that Nagakura would be able to re-invest some of those earnings toward the collection’s continued expansion. Hida Minzoku-kan (“Hida Folklife Hall”), as the new museum was named, was set up in a restored house brought in from the nearby countryside. Attracting higher than expected numbers of visitors from its opening day in July 1959, by the end of its first decade the folklore museum was one of the pillars of the city’s tourism industry.2
