The Motorcar Museum of Japan is the country's first automobile museum and one of its largest private collections, built by industrialist Shozo Maeda, who opened it in 1978 and was later inducted into the Japan Automotive Hall of Fame. The full collection runs to around 800 cars spanning 1901 to the early Heisei era, with about 500 on display at any one time, and most of them still run.
The museum fills a grand red brick building outside Komatsu that looks like a European estate from the road. Inside there are three levels, and two of them are wrapped by mezzanine galleries that pack in even more cars. Headline machinery includes a Toyota 2000GT, a Mercedes 300SL and the Rolls-Royce Silver Spur that chauffeured Princess Diana on her Japan visit, but the real philosophy here is different: this museum proudly keeps the everyday cars people have forgotten, the saloons, kei cars, work vehicles and family Toyotas Japan actually lived with, alongside machines so obscure you will not see them anywhere else on Earth.
If your taste runs to 60s to 80s Japanese metal and JDM deep cuts, this is one of the best museums in the country. Plan for it, because it is a trek from anywhere, and worth every minute.
