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May 5, 2000 Ibaraki Prefecture Nature Museumfake exhibits and books, the museum abuts Sugaonuma Marsh . . . ” Today’s trip started off with a motorcycle accident. Less than hour after leaving home we happened across a fresh collision, with the helmeted rider still lying in the ditch, his white belly exposed and heaving. Help was on its way, so we continued.
We reached the museum and nature park–planned and built by Ibaraki Prefecture over the course of nine years for the astounding price tag of almost two hundred million dollars– unsure what to expect. What we found boggled our minds. The museum itself is roughly 8000 square meters, the surrounding grounds cover close to 17 hectares, and to say that it is phenomenally well done really does nothing but illustrate the poverty of words to describe impressive things. The exhibits begin with the creation of the earth and move along the well-trodden path of the different biological evolutionary stages. What’s astounding is the effort that has gone into making these things interesting to children and parents. Regular guided tours, easy to understand explanations, vivid layouts…all of these things make the museum exciting and fun. More importantly, the exhibits never rely on fake displays to the detriment of real ones. For example, there’s a T-rex display doing the typical wide-jawed growl we’ve come to expect from this predictably typecast dino, but next to him is an actual fossilized skeleton. The big, lumbering, fake robot certainly holds your attention–and rivets the attention of children–but it leads naturally to the real McCoy beside which it sits. Another section of the museum has a fake animal-watching exhibit, where you can use spotting scopes to peer at fakeanimals nailed up into fake trees. By itself this would qualify as the worst kind of de-naturing natural display. However, the museum has
included numerous specimens of real birds and animals, and even has two or three stuffed critters that children can pet. Leaving aside your personal stance on specimen collecting and the ethics of taxidermical petting zoos, the brunt of the museum’s displays are real, and the few Disney-like exhibits play a distinct third fiddle to the genuine ones. The museum is now holding an exhibit centered around the German doctor and naturalist Von Siebold, who came to Japan at the end of the Edo period and brought back thousands of specimens to Holland. On loan from the Leiden Museum of Natural History, among other institutions, is an impressive record of Japanese flora and fauna from the early 1800’s.
The museum has a library that not only contains real books but, rarer still, patrons actually reading them. A hands-on observation center, a seminar center, an events calendar that includes flower watching field trips to Mt. Tsukuba, fossil digging, wild animal observation, water lily study trips…this is a fraction of the comprehensive approach Ibaraki Prefecture has taken to make ordinary people interested in the mechanics–and magic–of the world around us. Far from being just a giant modern structure filled with dead animals, fake exhibits and books, the museum abuts Sugaonuma Marsh*, which runs more than three miles long and almost five hundred yards in width. The marsh lies within the prefecture’s largest wildlife protection preserve. A wooden walkway spans one end of the marsh and provides numerous ideal vantage points from which to view the marsh’s avifauna. Almost 200 species have been recorded at this marsh, and you get a free checklist when you enter the birdwatching area. The list doesn’t simply tell you which birds have been sighted, it also has full-color photographs of the commoner and easily-identified visitors such as Tundra Swans, Mallards, Common Teal, Northern Pintail and Spot-billed Duck. The obvious plan is to get non-birders interested in birds by teaching them to name the most easily seen species. This is grass-roots nature watching at its best. Plainly, this is a place that takes multiple trips to even begin fully exploring. Moreover, all of the observation areas yield different opportunities for discovery depending on the season. This, all this, for the price of about seven dollars; two bucks if you prefer not to tour the museum, and parking’s free. We couldn’t help reflect on the pay-per-service system in Nikko*, and how quickly you spent more and got less.
What is also apparent is that the prefecture views the museum as an ongoing project. Communities often develop nature-based tourism on the assumption that once the facility is finished, all you have to do is sit back let the money roll in. This is about as realistic as thinking that once you’ve opened a retail store, your work is done. Nature facilities, like businesses, have to be in a continual state of planning, maintaining, improving and improvising in order to successfully compete with other tourist destinations once the novelty of the facility has worn off. One key to successful business is creating your own demand, and involving more people in nature watching by having a full calendar year of events and activities will reinforce the facility as a place people want to visit. This facility costs almost eight million dollars a year to operate, exclusive of personnel, and is regularly five million dollars in debt at the end of each fiscal year. With roughly 450 thousand annual users, the park contributes heavily to the surrounding rural community on the outskirts of Iwai City, but park administrators have never tried to quantify the impact. The biggest–only–down side to the park had nothing to do with the facility and everything to do with the visitors. The park’s conservation ethic is boldly and repeatedly stated at all points and at all exhibits: don’t touch, don’t disturb, don’t take, don’t litter. Park users responded, especially in the aquatic sites, with wholesale squishing of tadpoles, insect collecting, flower picking and the grossest kinds of facility abuse imaginable. Smiling fathers, dangling cigarettes dropping ash into the pond, encouraged their children to scoop up as many fry and tadpoles as possible and put them in empty plastic pop bottles. Fermata harshly rebuked the offenders, and was greeted with insipid "Who me?" smiles and cessation of the outlawed activities until we turned our backs.
Getting thereBy carFrom Tokyo, take the Joban Expressway and exit at the Kashiwa Interchange. Take Highway 16 towards Omiya. The signs for the museum are in Japanese, but the museum logo is a mastodon. After about 8km turn right at the Noda Police Station onto Prefectural Road 3, which then crosses the Tonegawa River. The park is a short stretch after the big bridge on your right. By train From Ueno Station take the JR Joban Line to Kashiwa Station, and transfer to the Tobu Noda Line. One stop later get off at Atago Station and take the Ibaraki Express Bus for "Iwai Shako" and get off at the stop for the Ibaraki Nature Museum. It’s a ten-minute walk from the bus stop to the museum grounds. Trip du Jour, May 5, 2000
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