Museum of the Meiji Restoration

Hometown museum on the Satsuma samurai who toppled the shogunate

The Ishin Furusato-kan, to give it its Japanese name, sits on the riverbank where many of the architects of modern Japan lived as boys. It is a small, friendly, well-translated museum and the right first stop for anyone trying to make sense of why this provincial Satsuma capital matters so much in Japanese history.

The basement holds a 25-minute animatronic theatre that walks through the events of the Restoration in good English subtitles; the upstairs galleries cover the lives of Saigo, Okubo, and the nineteen Satsuma students smuggled to Britain in 1865. Allow an hour. Combined tickets are sold with Sengan-en and with the Reimeikan if you plan to see all three.

things to do museum
A story
Of the four men whose names are most associated with the Meiji Restoration, three — Saigo Takamori, Okubo Toshimichi and Komatsu Tatewaki — grew up within a few minutes' walk of this museum, on the same Kajiya-cho block. The exhibits include a working animatronic of Saigo and Okubo arguing across a low table about Korea, the dispute that ended their friendship and led to the 1877 rebellion.

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