Nagoya Touken Museum: Two Hundred Swords, Armour and Ukiyo-e

The Japanese sword is one of the few objects where the craft and the mythology are equally interesting, and most visitors only encounter it behind glass in a general museum with a two-line label.

The Nagoya Touken Museum, known as Meihaku, exists specifically for it. The building can display up to two hundred swords at once, including pieces designated National Treasures, Important Cultural Properties and Important Art Objects — a concentration that very few institutions anywhere can match.

Around them sit about fifty sets of armour and 150 ukiyo-e prints on permanent display, which is the right context: the prints show how the warrior class saw itself and wanted to be seen, and the armour shows what the swords were used alongside.

What lifts it above a display case is the interactive media. The museum has invested in ways of showing what is actually happening in a blade — the hamon temper line, the grain of the folded steel, the curve and how it was achieved — at magnifications and angles that standing in front of the object cannot give you. Sword appreciation is a genuinely technical discipline and this is the rare museum that tries to teach it rather than assume it.

Admission is valid for the day. There is a café and a museum shop on site, both charged separately.

The museum is in Sakae, central Nagoya, and is wheelchair accessible. At this price it is one of the cheapest serious museum visits in Japan, and it pairs naturally with the Tokugawa Art Museum, which holds one family's armour and blades rather than a national survey.