Shark Museum

Fun with (no live) Sharks

The building is clearly marked and hard to miss with the museum itself is on the second floor. The fee seemed reasonable and my husband even spraying for a trip to the ice Museum as well which is also in the same building. The shark Museum starts out with a little cautionary tale regarding the March 2011 tsunami set devastated this area. It's only a couple of rooms, and it is something important that people should know about this area even if they're only visiting as tourists. First there are a few pictures, and then there's a small theater where they show a documentary style video which includes interviews with various survivors and photographs of things as they were when the waters rolled out and things as they were once repairs have been made. It's been 10 years and the town has really recovered a lot better than I could have expected. After the theater, visitors enter the more aquatic side to see illustrations and demonstrations of our favorite cartilaginous invertebrates. One important note is that, while there's not a lot of English translation for a lot of the actual pieces, the illustrations on the wall of sharks do include English names for the sharks and not Latin names for the Sharks. This distinction is not true of the jellyfish aquarium in Yamagata. Inside the shark area, there's also a little theater, smaller than the first one, where a handful of people can watch a short documentary in which an English-speaking woman has been dubbed over in Japanese to explain something about sharks. The arch above the entrance to this tiny theater is a great photo op as a giant set of shark shaped jaws. They're actually a lot of good photo ops in this place I think, and I learned something about sharks, too. It was really fun.