Nawa Insect Museum

A Brick Museum Built for Beetles and Butterflies

The Nawa Insect Museum (名和昆虫博物館, Nawa Konchū Hakubutsukan, also written Nawa Konchu Hakubutsukan) is a two-storey brick building of 1919 standing inside Gifu Park in Gifu City, Gifu Prefecture, and it was entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 1996. Its registration number, 21-0001, marks it as the first building in the whole of Gifu Prefecture to receive that status.

The museum grew out of a research body rather than a collection. Nawa Yasushi, an entomologist who had made his name by describing the Gifu butterfly (Luehdorfia japonica), set up the Nawa Institute of Entomology in 1896 to study insect pests and the insects that keep them in check. The institute moved to the foot of Mount Kinka in 1904, and the museum opened its doors on 26 October 1919 as its public face. It has been run by Nawa's descendants ever since, and it remains the oldest museum in Japan devoted entirely to insects.

Roughly 12,000 species are held here, amounting to more than 300,000 specimens.

Takeda Goichi and the Reason for Registration

The architect was Takeda Goichi (1872-1938), who at the time was principal of the Nagoya Higher Technical School and who later shaped a generation of architects in Kyoto. He is often called the father of modern architecture in Japan's Kansai region, and this small building carries several of his habits of mind.

Look at the porte-cochère first. Its gable has been worked into a shallow pediment in the manner of a Greek temple, a classical gesture grafted onto a Japanese brick box roofed with ordinary sangawara pantiles. The gable roof runs the length of the building; the walls are brick; the covering is fired clay. Nothing about the combination was ordinary in 1919.

Inside stand three round wooden columns with a history of their own. They were obtained when Tōshōdaiji in Nara was taken apart for repair, and they were installed here with their termite damage left visible rather than planed away. A museum founded to study insect damage chose to keep the evidence of insect damage in its own structure. Few architectural jokes are so precisely aimed.

The national register recognised the building under the criterion covering works that serve as a model of design. In practice that means the ministry judged the composition itself, the pediment, the brickwork, the proportions of a small civic building by a major architect, worth protecting in its own right.

What to Look For, and How to Get In

The museum sits inside Gifu Park, a short walk from the ropeway that climbs Mount Kinka to Gifu Castle, so most visitors arrive with something else already on their list. Give the exterior a few minutes before going in. The brick has weathered to an uneven rust colour, and the classical entrance reads very differently in morning light than under the heavy green shade of summer.

Next door is the Nawa Memorial Insect Hall of 1907, also designed by Takeda, raised on posts so that air could circulate under the floor and protect the specimens stored above. It is a designated cultural property of Gifu City. Standing between the two buildings gives you twelve years of one architect's development at a glance. West of the museum is the Konchūhi, a stone monument to the souls of insects, put up in 1919 for Nawa Yasushi's sixtieth birthday and designed by the same hand.

The museum is open from 10:00 to 17:00. It closes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, though it opens on public holidays that fall on those days, and it stays open every day through the Japanese school summer break. Admission is 650 yen for visitors of high-school age and above and 450 yen for children aged four and over, with reduced rates for groups of twenty or more; groups that book in advance can sometimes be received on a normal closing day. Buses from JR Gifu Station and Meitetsu Gifu Station towards Nagara stop at Gifu Park, and the walk from the stop takes about five minutes.

Photography rules vary between the historic fabric and the display cases, so ask at the desk before raising a camera.