Dragonfly Nature Park, Shimanto City, Shikoku

The Dragonfly Kingdom Nature Park is a well known attraction in the area. Just outside the town centre of Nakamura in Shimanto-ku is a 50 hectare park featuring enough habitats to give you the potential to see 76 different species of dragonfly.

Construction of the Dragonfly sanctuary began in 1986 with the conversion of some abandoned paddy fields into ponds with a variety of flowers selected to be attractive to dragonfly. Work has continued and now includes a sizable museum and fresh water aquarium. Of course, not all the dragonfly species are observable in the nature park at any one time, the different species have hatching periods between March and December.

If you arrive on very wet day, like we did, you may see only a couple of the insects outside in the park. However, while the specimens mounted in display cabinets inside can't quite match the sparkling iridescence of real live creatures, they certainly give you an excellent display of the wide variety that exists.

The aquarium section of the museum housed some of the most enormous and unusual fish I've seen. The stars of the show are the Arapaima Gigas.

If you show up at 4pm, you might get to help feed them if you are lucky. They snap up their dinner of small fish with lightening fast bites. It quite enthralled these young children, which also gives you an idea of the size of the fish.

All my other photos of the fish were of poor quality. This is one of the less bad ones of one of the many unusual species they have there. The 80 large and small tanks contain over 300 different species with more than 3,000 specimens of freshwater fish and estuarine water fish from Japan and around the world. Most are well labelled with the latin names.

Entry to the Nature park is free, The museum and aquarium are open from 09:00 to 17:00 every day except Monday, Entrance fee 840Yen. (420Yen for children.)

 Access is 10 minutes by car from Nakamura station on the Tosa Kurishio line. Many more pictures on the Dragonfly Kingdom website. ( Japanese text only)

Sakamoto Ryoma Memorial Museum

We went to a number of museums during the holiday. One of the most modern and stylish looking building was the Sakamoto Ryoma Memorial Museum in Kochi.

Sakamoto Ryoma was born in Kochi in 1835 and made a major contribution to changes in the political scene in Japan. He was assassinated at age 33 shortly after he formulated the Eight point program for the modernisation of Japan.

The locals are understandably proud of their local hero, the airport is named after him and one Kochi cafe manages to produce an impressive portrait of Ryoma on their cafe lattes. It's a shame I only discovered that today otherwise I'd have my own photo to share.

The museum located on the coast about 20 minutes drive from Kochi centre is open from 9am to 5pm all year round and entrance fee is 500 yen.

There are not that many exhibits for such a large building and very little English text. The museum website reproduces the brochure which contains basically all the exhibit labels that were in English, so unless your Japanese is very strong it does not take that long to go round.

Eros Museum Seoul

I discovered the Eros Museum of Seoul when I was wandering around the city in the area near the Blue House.

It had just opened its doors to the public for the first time on Aug 21st 2007.
It is on three floors and has a small but interesting collection of artefacts relating to erotic art in Korea, China, Japan and other Asian countries.


As this is a family friendly blog I will not show you the full image..

but there are plenty of examples of Japanese 'Shunga' works on display.
You will have to go to the museum to see the rest of the picture.

The museum is open every day except Monday. Admission is 5,000 won. You may not want to the take the children, unless you want to do a lot of explaining. To get to the museum go to Seoul Selection bookshop and continue walking north towards the Blue House. The museum is on the right hand side of the road. The local bus (number 11) from Gwanghwamun stops fairly close by.
The museum printed the name of their website on the flyer, but while they are paying for the domain they do not seem to be running a website there yet.

When researching some links for this blog post I came across the Asia Eros Museum in Seoul which was opened in May 2003 and was mentioned by the BBC at the time as the first sex museum to open in Korea.