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Mosaic Tile Museum Tajimi

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

Researched and written by Hinato

mosaic tileTerunobu FujimoriTajimiMino warearchitecture

Photo: Yuya Tamai from Gifu, Japan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) · original

Mosaic Tile Museum Tajimi doesn't fit neatly into a single category, which is part of why it's easy to overlook in Gifu.

Kasahara in Tajimi makes more mosaic tile than anywhere else in Japan, and in 2016 the town gave itself a museum for it. Terunobu Fujimori designed the building as a clay mine — a lumpy earthen mound with grass and pine trees growing out of the roof and tile fragments pressed into the walls, which looks like a mistake until you understand that it is exactly the hill the clay comes out of.

Inside you climb to the top floor first and work down. The fourth floor holds salvaged tile pieces from demolished buildings — bathhouse walls, shop fronts, sinks — arranged as artefacts, and the light comes through a hole in the roof. Below that are the manufacturers' showrooms and a workshop where you make your own tile piece. Entry is ¥310 and free for anyone of high school age or under.

Visiting essentials

Cost

¥310 permanent exhibition | ¥250 groups of 20 or more | Free for high school students and under | Annual pass ¥1,020

Hours

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Last entry 4:30 PM

Closed: Closed Mondays, or the following weekday when the Monday is a public holiday | Closed 29 December – 3 January

Best season

Year-round

How long to allow

90 minutes

Finding your way there

Access notes

Kasahara-cho 2082-5, Tajimi. By car from Tajimi IC, or by bus from JR Tajimi Station. Closed Mondays, or the following weekday when the Monday is a public holiday, and 29 December – 3 January. Admission ¥310 for the permanent exhibition, ¥250 for groups of 20 or more, free for high school students and under; an annual pass is ¥1,020. A tile-making workshop operates on the ground floor.

Local tips

**Start at the top and come down.** The building is designed to be entered from the fourth floor, where the salvaged tile collection sits under a hole in the roof. Going up first and drifting down is how it reads. **Free for high school age and under.** ¥310 for everyone else. It is one of the cheapest museum tickets you will find for architecture of this quality. **Fujimori designed it as a clay mine.** Grass and pines growing from the roof, tile shards pressed into the render. The point is that the material and the landform are the same thing. **The salvaged tiles are the collection.** Bathhouse walls, shopfronts and sinks rescued from demolition. They are the reason the museum exists rather than a display of new products. **Do the workshop.** Making a tile piece on the ground floor takes under an hour and is the part children remember.

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