Category: Urban Essays

Our volunteer time will start soon!

We were asked to be local P.R. volunteers for Fukuoka City Museum for the next half year, starting 1 July. (This is the first trial period for this volunteer system.) We don’t know many people, so we will talk about it here, and try to use our weblog to help promote the museum.

On Sunday, 29 June, we went to a briefing session about it. There had been pretty heavy rain from the night before, and we actually worried if the busses would run as usual. (All Kyushu had a heavy rain or flood warning!) Unexpectedly the weather changed for the better, so we were relieved.

We visited the air conditioning room for the whole building and part of the storerooms we usually can’t see, had a guided tour of the permanent exhibition, and looked through the four sections of the rotating exhibit from the permanent collection with a curator.

To tell the truth, the museum hopes that everybody will pay more attention to the rotating exhibits from the permanent collection! (That’s why we will be P.R. volunteers!)
• After you see the permanent exhibition, you can get a general idea of the history of Fukuoka.
• You can see a real ‘national treasure’: the famous gold seal. (It was found at Shikanoshima, in Higashi Ward, Fukuoka City. You can see a picture of it in Japanese school textbooks. It’s the real one. Not a replica!)
• Actually, the four sections of the rotating exhibit from the permanent collection are not always the same. They change the exhibits every second month, in all four sections: history, art and crafts, archaeology, and ethnology.
Personally, we are looking forward to the Fuku-Haku Photo Studio exhibit from 23 July to 7 September. We will see many pictures of old Fukuoka! (We like this kind of thing.)

The special exhibition currently at the museum is on until 31 August: ‘Yoshimura Sakuji’s New Discovery! Egypt Exhibition’.
During this exhibition we can eat Egyptian food called fasolia at the café on the second floor. We felt hungry after the session, and we tried it. We can reccommend it to people who like tomato based curry! (It has beef and beans in it.)

Later on, we want to write more about the museum.

– YS, 29 June 2008

29 June 2008