One hundred years from now, what will tell the story of our lives?

Will it be the merchandise from our favorite fandoms? Face masks and acrylic partitions? Or perhaps a mobile phone covered in stickers?

Today, these things seem entirely ordinary. Yet a century from now, they may have disappeared from the world altogether.

Those are the kinds of objects this museum collects—not dazzling jewels, royal treasures, or masterpieces of art, but the living traces of ordinary people.

The museum's founder, Shozen Nakayama, believed that simply learning another language was not enough for people to truly understand one another. To understand someone, you must also know how they lived, the customs that shaped their lives, and what they placed their faith in. Only then, he believed, could genuine understanding begin.

That conviction led him to say, "Don't collect beautiful things. Collect the things worn smooth by human hands."

Today, the museum houses approximately 300,000 objects. Some preserve cultures that have already disappeared from the places where they once existed. Among them are materials documenting the traditional way of life of Taiwan's Indigenous peoples.

By the time efforts were made to preserve some of these traditions locally, parts of that culture had already been lost. Yet they survived here.

These are the things that might otherwise have been forgotten forever. That is why this museum holds objects found nowhere else.

Before you continue, look down at your feet. A map of the world stretches across the floor. Throughout this guide, we invite you to look beyond the exhibits and meet the people behind them. How did they live? What did they fear? What did they hope for? What did they pray for?

This guide cannot answer those questions for you. But by the end of your visit, the objects from distant cultures may no longer feel so distant. You may even begin to recognize something of yourself in them.

Now, let us begin our journey through the Tenri Sankokan Museum.