In Japan, Even the Odd Can Have a Museum

TOKYO —  Some pretty weird stuff is on display in Japan. There are, for example, a 29-foot tapeworm, a collection of ruined laundry and a very big, bright-red sock made for pro wrestler Giant Baba.

This is a land of obsessive collectors and odd museums.

“If Japanese are rich, they collect paintings; if they are not rich, they collect whatever they can,” said Hideo Nishioka, director of a museum of Tokyo’s history. He collects toilet paper, ashtrays and cookbooks.

Expensive artwork acquired by multimillionaires often disappears into board rooms or safe storage, but Japan’s inveterate collectors of nearly everything else often want the world to see their treasures.

Dozens of off-beat museums make it possible.

Some house obscure personal collections, such as the Safe and Key Museum in the hard-to-find home of a Tokyo safe wholesaler.

Others are established by corporations to show off their own products.

The Meguro Parasitological Museum in Tokyo began as one doctor’s collection from the Golden Parasitological Era, when human waste was used as fertilizer. Visitors will find the king-sized tapeworm, pressed under glass, about halfway through the dark, one-room museum of parasites.

Just outside Tokyo, the Naigai Sock Museum displays 20,000 pairs of socks made by the Naigai sock factory. Giant Baba’s sock, 12.4 inches along the foot and 22.4 inches from calf to heel, is displayed in a group with the socks of a novelist and a former prime minister.

In the Cleaning Museum of the Hakuyosha laundry company, old irons and dented machines share space with two racks of laundry “mistakes,” such as an unraveling sweater.

Other museums display comic books, buttons, sand, pens and cameras. Dozens are devoted to sex.

A granite building houses a Shinto priest’s store of African and Japanese phallic symbols, yellowing Playboy centerfolds, erotic Indian miniatures and other sexual items from many cultures.

Also displayed are a few fading photographs of the collector--Aimaru Kubo, a priest of the Taga Shinto shrine on the southern island of Shikoku--smiling in various exotic locations.

Many of the sex museums are associated with shrines of the Shinto religion, an earthy faith that celebrates nature.

The Japanese talent for using English evocatively makes some museum titles almost more interesting than their contents.

Guides to Tokyo museums and galleries list, for instance, the Takarakuji Dream Hall and the Striped House Museum, which respectively identify the national lottery exhibition and a gallery of contemporary art in a striped building.