Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum

photo by 663highland · CC BY-SA 3.0

A column of the Tōshōdai-ji temple stands at full scale, over 7 metres tall, without a single nail.

Under a double-height ceiling rises, at full scale, a column with its bracket framework from Tōshōdai-ji in Nara: it is over 7 metres tall and stands without a single nail, held only by wooden joints. Next to it, a ‘skeleton tea room’ leaves on view the structure that normally disappears under the plaster. The museum displays about a thousand tools from a collection of over thirty thousand, three minutes from Shin-Kobe Station.

Japan's only museum devoted to carpentry tools, founded in 1984 and moved in 2014 to its current building in front of Shin-Kobe Station. It houses the collection assembled by the construction company Takenaka, which specialises in the carpentry and wood-jointing techniques (kigumi, 木組み) used in temples and traditional tea houses; a temple carpenter (miyadaiku) sometimes works live in the museum's workshop.

ℹ️ Open 9:30–16:30, last entry 16:00. Closed on Mondays, or the following day if Monday is a public holiday, and from 26 December to 7 January. A revision of fees is planned from 2026: check the updated price on the official site. For reference, the previous fee was 500 yen for adults, 100–300 yen for students and 200 yen for over-65s.

🚉 Shin-Kobe · 5 min walk

Sources: feel-kobe.jp · ja.wikipedia.org

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