The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka possesses a collection of ethnographic objects, about 21,000 in number, received in 1975 from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Education (now integrated to the National Institute of Japanese Literature). The accumulation of this collection started in the 1910s under the initiative of SHIBUSAWA Keizo, who served as Japan’s first Minister of Finance after World War II and as President of Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. Ltd. (now KDDI). This collection has been expanded while being passed into the hands of various organizations, such as the Attic Museum, led by Shibusawa, and the Japanese Society of Ethnology (now the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology). Because the collection materialized into its final form at the museum attached to the Japanese Society of Ethnology in Hoya (now Nishi-Tokyo), Tokyo, we named it "Hoya Museum" Collection.

This database introduces the Hoya Museum Collection’s ethnographic objects, as well as the people who collected them. From the page of a collector, images of ethnographic objects he / she collected can be browsed, and details of an object are shown by clicking its image.

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