S P O T ／ SPOT-085

B-Hōkan (Museum of B-Grade Treasures)

B宝館びーほうかん

B-Hōkan — roughly, 'Museum of B-Grade Treasures' — is the private museum of economist and television commentator Morinaga Takurō, opened in 2014 in a small three-story concrete building in suburban Tokorozawa. The official tagline is 'a poor, foolish, but beautiful museum,' and the contents make good on the promise: hundreds of thousands of items of mass-produced postwar Japanese consumer flotsam, painstakingly categorized and displayed as the social history of a particular country between roughly 1950 and the present. Glico caramel-box prizes are arranged by year. Plastic milk-bottle caps are sorted by region. Kinnikuman gum erasers, empty cigarette packs, vintage matchbox labels, and 1970s soft-drink cans are filed by manufacturer. The argument is the same throughout: that which the consumer society throws away is the actual record of how the consumer society lived, and one obsessive economist with a working knowledge of taxonomy can flip 'trash' into 'archive' simply by classifying it correctly. Open by appointment only; small, residential, and one of the strangest serious arguments for what a museum can be in the country.