Shokoshuseikan
- Built: 1865
- Opened as a museum: 1923
- Japanese: 尚古集成館 (Shou ko shuu sei kan)
The Shôkoshûseikan is a museum and archive in Kagoshima closely associated with the Shimazu clan and the history of Satsuma province.
The main hall (honkan) of the museum was originally built in 1865 in accordance with the dying wishes of former daimyô Shimazu Nariakira (d. 1858) as one of a group of factories, originally called the Shûseikan. At its peak, the factory employed over two thousand workers.[1] The main hall is today designated an Important Cultural Property. The complex originally also included reverberating furnaces, blast furnaces, a smithy, a foundry, and a glass workshop; the remains of some of these structures are still visible today.
The building was established as a museum in 1923; the Bakumatsu period industrial history of the area is a particular prominent theme of the museum, but its collections, roughly 10,000 items in total, also include many objects from the Shimazu family collections, as well as examples of traditional ceramics and objects related to the 1863 Anglo-Satsuma War (also known as the Bombardment of Kagoshima).
The Shôkoshûseikan complex today also includes the Iso Palace and Sengan'en garden of the Shimazu clan, originally constructed in 1658 and used as a secondary villa for the Shimazu up until the Meiji period, when it became the primary Kagoshima residence of the family for a time.
References
- Pamphlet available on-site.
- Shoko Shuseikan official website (English)
- ↑ Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press (1998), 202.
