Shikoku Mura Village Museum

Shikoku Mura Village Museum preserves over thirty traditional buildings relocated from throughout Shikoku Island, creating an open-air architectural museum that documents rural Japanese life from the Edo period through early 20th century. The museum sprawls across mountain slopes on the Yashima plateau, with relocated structures arranged along winding paths through forested terrain, each building carefully restored and furnished with period-appropriate tools, furniture, and household items. The collection includes thatched-roof farmhouses, a kabuki theater, lighthouse keeper's residence, sugar-making facility, vine suspension bridge, rural shrine, and merchant townhouses, representing the diversity of traditional Japanese architecture and regional building techniques. Each structure tells stories of how previous generations lived, worked, and adapted to Shikoku's varied geography and climate. The farmhouses display different regional styles, from steep-roofed mountain dwellings designed to shed heavy snow to open coastal homes that maximize air circulation. The vine bridge, originally from remote mountain valleys where such bridges were the only way to cross deep gorges, demonstrates traditional construction using woven vines and cables, with modern safety additions allowing visitors to experience the swaying crossing. The transported kabuki theater from Kotohira features complete stage machinery including revolving stages and trap doors, occasionally hosting traditional performances.

The museum's hillside setting at Yashima was chosen deliberately, allowing each relocated building to be sited among trees and along footpaths in a way that echoes its original rural context rather than presenting structures as isolated exhibits in a flat, formal grid. Many of the buildings came from remote mountain and coastal communities across Shikoku that were facing depopulation in the postwar decades, meaning the museum also functions as an act of preservation for structures that might otherwise have been lost entirely. Walking between them, visitors encounter changes in elevation, shaded groves, and small clearings that mirror the varied terrain the original owners once farmed or fished, giving the collection a lived-in quality uncommon among open-air museums. The juxtaposition with Tadao Ando's concrete gallery on the same grounds is intentional, inviting reflection on how traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture each respond to landscape and material in their own way, even as they sit only a short walk apart.