Taiji Whale Museum

Taiji is a small town on the Kumano coast where organised whaling in Japan began — a system of nets and coordinated boats developed here in the seventeenth century and spread from it. The museum, opened in 1969, is the most substantial collection anywhere on the history and technology of Japanese whaling: harpoons, boats, scale models of the net-whaling fleets, scrimshaw, and the ritual and religious material that grew around a dangerous trade.

It also keeps live cetaceans in a natural inlet and adjoining pools and runs shows, and the town's dolphin drive hunt has made it the subject of sustained international criticism, including the 2009 documentary The Cove. Visitors should know that before deciding whether to go. As a historical museum it is genuinely important; the living-animal side is what the controversy concerns.