Tottori Folk Crafts Museum (Mingei)

The Tottori Folk Crafts Museum was founded in 1949 by local industrialist and craft advocate Shoya Yoshida, who built the collection around the mingei (folk craft) movement led by philosopher Yanagi Soetsu, potter Shoji Hamada, and woodworker Kanjiro Kawai. Yoshida was a close associate of these mingei-movement figures, and the museum's holdings reflect their shared aesthetic philosophy that everyday, anonymously made craft objects hold artistic value equal to fine art. The permanent collection includes regional pottery, textiles, lacquerware, and woodwork gathered from Tottori and other parts of Japan, alongside Western and Korean folk-craft pieces that influenced the movement's thinking. The museum occupies a building constructed in the traditional kura (storehouse) style with white plastered walls, chosen deliberately to echo the vernacular architecture the mingei movement celebrated rather than a Western-style gallery format. Objects are displayed with minimal descriptive labeling, in keeping with the movement's philosophy of letting the craftsmanship of everyday objects speak for itself rather than framing them within academic art-historical narrative. The building and much of its founding collection remain largely as Yoshida arranged them at the museum's founding, giving it the character of a preserved mid-20th-century collector's museum rather than a modernized institutional gallery.