S P O T ／ SPOT-368

Megane Museum (Eyeglass Museum)

めがねミュージアムめがねみゅーじあむ

In a snowbound corner of Fukui Prefecture, an entire town has devoted itself to a single object: the eyeglass. Sabae produces roughly 95% of all frames made in Japan, and the Megane Museum is the shrine that obsession built. Its home, the Megane Kaikan ("Eyeglass Hall"), wears a giant red pair of glasses on its roof as a landmark, and — in a detail that borders on the fanatical — the building itself is shaped like a pair of spectacles when seen from directly above. Step inside and the first thing to greet you hangs overhead: a sphere about 3.2 meters across, assembled from roughly 700 metal frames, so that hundreds of pairs of glasses coalesce into one glowing orb. The free third-floor museum traces a century-plus of local history that began in 1905, when the farmer Masunaga Gozaemon imported Osaka craftsmen to give his neighbors off-season work; it also shows the titanium frames that Sabae pioneered, and a "celebrity eyewear collection" gathered by comedian and eyeglass ambassador Kon Omura, including glasses once worn by singer Hibari Misora and film star Yujiro Ishihara. This is not a general museum but the visualization of an industrial monomania — a place that speaks of nothing, and everything, but glasses.