Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum

The Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum is a specialist institution dedicated to the tools used in traditional Japanese architecture and woodworking. The collection is extraordinary for its depth: hand planes, chisels, saws, and measuring instruments spanning from prehistoric Japan to the present, with particular emphasis on the tools used to construct Japan's famous temples, shrines, and castles.

The museum is near Shin-Kobe station, making it convenient to combine with Nunobiki Falls. Despite the narrow subject matter, it is genuinely fascinating for anyone interested in craftsmanship or Japanese architecture. The displays explain how traditional joints, beams, and decorative woodwork were achieved without nails, and the precision of the tools themselves — some with blades sharpened to measurements in thousandths of millimetres — is remarkable.

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The museum was founded by Takenaka Corporation, one of Japan's largest construction companies, as a way of preserving knowledge of traditional Japanese woodworking before it disappeared. The company commissioned replicas of historic tools using the original techniques, and the craftsmen who made those replicas became part of the permanent collection — their work tools displayed alongside the ancient ones they were copying.

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