To visit the Nintendo Museum in the leafy suburbs of Uji City’s Oguracho district, about a half hour train ride from their headquarters in Kyoto, is to journey back to simpler and happier times. Most museums, of course, strive to dig up the past and present it in such a way that contemporary audiences can easily digest it, but it’s rare to feel this transformation take place quite so literally. As you leave the bustling modernity of Kyoto Station behind, concrete gives way to fields, mountains and farms, transporting you to the kind of rural idyll you might remember from games like Attack of the Friday Monsters or Famicom Detective Club.
The streets are quiet when we visit the Museum ahead of its opening on 2nd October, and the town itself doesn’t seem prepared for the carriagefuls of visitors that will no doubt be spilling out of the station’s trio of ticket gates come next month. But Nintendo has long had a presence here, as the Museum is built on the site of Nintendo’s former hanafuda manufacturing plant, opened in 1969. Indeed, the focus of its three buildings now lies as much with Nintendo’s pre-Mario days of making playing cards, as it does with the video games it makes today.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Watch on YouTube
Indeed, one of the last things you see as you leave the museum is a framed work of calligraphy by Chin-Seki Tsumura, who donated the piece to Nintendo when its head office was built in 1971. Its bold brushstrokes depict the words “Ninten” – the famous phrase that means “leaving luck to heaven”, which is widely believed to be what Nintendo’s name represents.
It’s one of only two objects in the whole museum that has an accompanying plaque beside it, detailing the artist and meaning of the phrase so you know what you’re looking at and what its significance is. Admittedly, this kind of hands-off approach and almost outright refusal to define and contextualise its own history is one that both makes and breaks the Nintendo Museum as an experience (more on that in a sec). But I do think there is something oddly fitting about the fact that even this rare morsel of information still manages to fire the imagination in a way that resists being tied down by the dry and heavy boot of factual absolutes.
As Nintendo buffs may well already know, the exact origin of Nintendo’s name is still unknown, and the plaque states as much, leaving visitors to wonder what other possibilities might exist as they peruse the spacious aisles of its hardware-themed gift shop and agonise over whether to spend upwards of £60’s worth of Yen on a giant, plush Wii Remote (SNES, Famicom and N64 controller plushes are also available).
Forging your own connections with Nintendo’s vast history of work is very much the theme of this museum, and as visitors funnel their way past the Game Boy-themed lockers and umbrella stands (possibly stopping to grab a quick drink from the mouth of the Kirby vending machine in the process), finish posing for photos in the large green warp pipes outside, and tear themselves away from the five Toads in the brightly-lit entrance that break out into a harmonious (if slightly cursed) chorus when you waggle their large and bulbous heads, they’ll be told as much on a large TV screen as they queue to ascend into the museum’s first major exhibit: the Product Floor.