Started in 1901 to make oil lamps, it survived by producing glass floats for fishing.
Visitors walk into a stone building from 1901, built as an oil-lamp factory. When electricity made the lamps obsolete, the factory switched to glass floats for herring fishing nets; in the eighties, with plastic and the collapse of fishing, it reinvented itself a third time as a gallery for tourists on the redeveloped canal.
The building, now designated a historic building by the City of Otaru, has come through more than a century changing its production three times, each time following the decline of one industry and the rise of the next.
ℹ️ The shop and the gallery are on Sakaimachi Street, in the canal district redeveloped for tourism.
🚉 Minami-Otaru · 7 min walk
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Nearby
Otaru Music Box Museum100 mphoto by Arjan Richter from Maarssen, The Netherlands · CC BY 2.0
Financial Museum of the Former Otaru Branch of the Bank of Japan800 mphoto by Komatta · Public domain
Otaru Canal1.3 kmphoto by tsushima · CC BY 3.0
Nikka Yoichi Distillery17.7 kmphoto by y.ganden · CC BY 2.0