Meiji University Museum — Criminal Materials
明治大学博物館 刑事部門 · Meiji University Museum — Criminal Materials
- Ward
- Chiyoda
- Price
- Free
- Hours
- Mon–Fri 10:00–17:00 (last entr
- Closed
- Sundays, public holidays, summer and winter closures
- Getting there
- 5 min walk from JR Ochanomizu, 10 min from Jimbocho
- Founded
- 1929
- The guillotine and the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg exist nowhere else in Japan
- The models were reconstructed from a magistrate's confidential record
- The display is not there to shock
We do not republish copyrighted photographs. Use the links below to see the actual venue.
Obvious to locals, invisible to visitors
There is a simple reason guidebooks leave this out: to the people who live here it is too obvious to be worth explaining.
Both are reproductions, but they are the only ones on public display in Japan. They were built alongside the Japanese exhibits when the museum opened in 1929, to set Edo-period punishment against European practice of the 17th and 18th centuries. The craftsmanship would cost millions of yen to replicate today.
Instruments of torture and execution were not the sort of thing preserved as historical record, so no originals could be found. The models were instead reconstructed from the detailed descriptions in a confidential late-Edo magistrate's manual. Those 1929 models are still the ones on display.
The first director was Professor Yoshitaka Otani of the law faculty. The faculty then held that punishment should be primarily educative, and the museum existed to make students grapple critically with how far cruel, pre-modern punishment fell short of that ideal.
Being a university facility it closes on Sundays and public holidays, with summer and winter breaks as well. Weekdays run to 17:00 but Saturdays end at 16:00. Allow thirty minutes to an hour at a brisk pace.
The basement gallery divides into commerce, criminal and archaeology. The commerce section covers how traditional crafts — lacquer, textiles, ceramics — are made; archaeology shows the university's excavation record, including finds from Iwajuku in Gunma, the first Palaeolithic site identified in Japan.
What it is
A free museum in the basement of a university campus, divided into commerce, criminal and archaeology sections — it is the criminal section people come for. It opened in 1929 as the Meiji University Criminal Museum, founded on the university's principle of 'rights and freedom', to document the history of punishment and the suppression of rights. Edo-period restraint tools and instruments of torture and execution are on display.
What to order
Why locals keep coming
Most exhibits are reconstructions made in 1929 from a confidential late-Edo magistrate's record. The same models remain on display ninety years later. Around 100,000 people visit each year.