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Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Museum

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

Researched and written by Hinato

Shibusawa EiichiFukayaMeiji industrybrickbirthplace

Illustration of Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Museum, Saitama — Illustration — not a photograph

Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Museum is easy to reduce to a photo stop, but the history behind it is what makes the stop worth making.

Shibusawa Eiichi was born in a farmhouse here in 1840 and went on to found or help found about five hundred companies, including Japan's first bank, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and firms that still exist under names everyone knows. He argued that business had to be justified in ethical terms and wrote a book pairing the Analects with the abacus to say so. He is on the ten-thousand-yen note issued from 2024.

The memorial museum stands near the house he grew up in, and the house itself, called Naka-n-chi, is open and free. The other Fukaya connection is physical: he set up the brick works that supplied around 8.83 million bricks for Tokyo Station, and the station building at Fukaya was rebuilt in 1996 as a scaled copy of Tokyo Station in acknowledgement, which is why a market town in northern Saitama has a red brick Renaissance-revival railway station.

Visiting essentials

How long to allow

1.5–2 hours

Best season

Year-round

Hours

Former Shibusawa residence Naka-n-chi 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM (entry until 4:30 PM) | Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Museum hours vary — confirm before travelling

Closed: Naka-n-chi closed December 29 – January 3

Admission

Free (former Shibusawa residence Naka-n-chi) | Memorial museum admission — confirm current pricing

Getting there

Directions

The former Shibusawa residence Naka-n-chi at Shimotebaka, Fukaya City, by car from Fukaya Station on the JR Takasaki Line. The Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Museum stands nearby; groups of ten or more must book in advance for the memorial museum reference room, Naka-n-chi and the Odaka Atsutada birthplace. Confirm current hours for the memorial museum before travelling.

Beyond the guidebook

**Naka-n-chi is free and it is the better half.** The farmhouse he grew up in, restored, with an android of Shibusawa delivering a lecture in one of the rooms — which is stranger and more effective than it sounds. **Fukaya Station is a scale copy of Tokyo Station.** Worth ten minutes on the platform before you leave. **He founded around five hundred companies and refused to build a conglomerate.** That is the argument the museum makes: he could have made himself a zaibatsu and deliberately did not, on the ethical grounds set out in his book on the Analects and the abacus. **Groups of ten or more must book.** Individuals and small groups can walk in. **The brick works ruin is nearby.** The Nihon Renga Seizo site at Fukaya has surviving Hoffmann kiln structures, occasionally open, and it is where the Tokyo Station bricks were actually fired. **Deep-fried Fukaya negi.** The town's other product is a sweet spring onion, and it turns up in everything from tempura to ice cream at the roadside stations.

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