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Iwashita New Ginger Museum

Little knownBarely documented in English. This is the kind of place the site exists for.

Researched and written by Hinato

new gingerIwashitaTochigi Cityquirky museumfree entry

Photo: Miyuki Meinaka / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · original

Iwashita New Ginger Museum sits at the center of a craft tradition that Tochigi has kept going for generations, not just preserved.

Iwashita Shokuhin makes shin-shoga, a pale pink pickled young ginger sold in a distinctive jar across Japan, and in 2015 the company opened a museum about it in central Tochigi. It is entirely sincere and entirely strange: rooms saturated in pink, a chandelier made of ginger, a ginger-shaped piano, an interactive area for children, a shrine to ginger, and a café serving ginger ramen, ginger curry and ginger parfaits.

There is a real corporate museum underneath the absurdity — the history of the company and how the product is made — but nobody comes for that. It costs nothing to enter, it is twelve minutes on foot from Tochigi Station in a town otherwise known for sober Edo-period merchant warehouses, and it is one of the more purely enjoyable hours available in the prefecture. The gift shop sells ginger in forms you did not know existed.

Plan your visit

Best time to visit

Year-round | Indoor site, unaffected by weather

Cost

Free | Café and shop priced separately

Hours

10:00 AM – 6:00 PM | Café last orders 5:30 PM

Closed: Closed Tuesdays, except national holidays | New Year period

Time to allow

45–60 minutes

Getting there

Directions

Tochigi City. About a short walk from JR and Tobu Tochigi Station. Free admission. Closed Tuesdays, except national holidays, and over the New Year period.

How it's made

**Eat something ginger.** The café is where the concept commits fully — ginger ramen, ginger curry, ginger parfait, ginger soft-serve. Visiting and not eating is missing the joke and the best part. **Free, so treat it as a stop.** There is no admission charge, which makes it a reasonable forty minutes to an hour rather than something to plan a day around. The pink rooms photograph well and that is a large part of the appeal. **Closed Tuesdays.** Standard for museums in the region, but worth checking against a Tochigi Kurazukuri walk, which is the other reason to be in this town. **Combine with the warehouse district.** Tochigi City's Edo-period merchant streets along the Uzuma River are ten minutes away and are the tonal opposite. Doing both in an afternoon is a strange and enjoyable contrast. **The shop is the souvenir stop.** Ginger in a dozen forms, including things that should not exist. It is the most distinctive edible souvenir in the prefecture after Utsunomiya gyoza.

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