Nakaoka Shintaro Museum

A quick walk through Nakaoka Shintaro Museum tells you less than a slow one — the details are where the history actually lives.

Sakamoto Ryoma is on every poster in Kochi. Nakaoka Shintaro, who brokered the Satsuma-Choshu alliance alongside him and was assassinated with him in the same room in Kyoto in 1867, gets a museum in the mountain village he came from and very little else. He was a village headman's son from Kitagawa, forty kilometres up the coast from Kochi city, and he left it at twenty-two.

The museum is run by the village and covers his life in detail — the political work, the alliance, the Rikuentai militia he formed, the killing. His restored birthplace stands nearby. It is a small, serious, municipal museum about a figure who is genuinely important and is permanently in someone else's shadow, in a village of two thousand people that also happens to contain a large Monet-themed garden.