Time for the forth and final post on museums this summer. This time UNKO MUSEUM – the poop museum, a temporary museum in a building adjacent to the baseball stadium in Fukuoka. We had seen posters for this museum in spring when we went to a Tomica toy car event at the same venue and ever since talked about visiting this museum. Now the time to enter the world of poop had finally arrived, although museum is a word that feels a little strange to use – a small pop-up poop theme park feels closer to the truth.
Being a hot summer holiday Saturday there were quite a lot of people wanting to visit the event. We had not bought tickets in advance, but the wait for our time slot was not too long and while waiting we went outside to the unko pool instead. This poop pool is a biggish inflated outdoor pool on the deck in front of the baseball dome, and there kids can float around in small electric boats while navigating floating plastic poop. For our son this was the highlight of the day, not because of the poop connection but because he could sit and steer a boat all by himself. He wanted to do it over and over, and we promised he could go one more time after the museum visit since it had become time for us to go inside.
Before entering the event venue we got to experience some usual queueing (I have by now got quite used to and good at queueing to experience things in Japan), but after being let in we got to see and take photos in different unko-themed displays, play in different interactive unko-inspired games, dance unko-dances and our son got to play in an unko-ball-sea, and of course the tour ended at the unko store where there were unko museum merchandise to buy. What is unusual, the event was bilingual and that was a nice surprise. I do not really know what I had expected, but as far as poop is concerned they had managed to make as cute an exhibition as possible I think, which was the expressed intention. If I would want our family to come back I am less certain, one visit seems quite sufficient.
As for our son’s final ride on the poop pool boat – it came to nothing. When we got there it had started to rain and they were packing up. And this was his lowlight of the day, I would like to use a more descriptive word than lowlight, but I think there has been enough unko-talk for one post.
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