Does anyone know if the following museums have a good english experience?

9 comments

1. I don’t but I can say the ONLY place I went that didn’t have a great English experience was the Basho museum in Tokyo. Most of Kyoto spoke better English than most of NYC. At the very least they will have a pamphlet with English descriptions

2. Kyoto Railway Museum is fairly good, but it is not 100% translated, so in some cases you will have less information than if you can read Japanese. I think that there is things like the lottery for the simulator that might be a bit harder to understand without Japanese, I do not clearly remember. Still it is good enough for you to enjoy.

   Edit : To comment on some of the replies, I went during the time of the first anniversary, so in 2017. I do speak Japanese on conversation level, but reading kanji is still a challenge. I went with a Japanese kid who love train.

   The thing with the lottery is you need to understand how to enter the lottery, check the result on time, etc. I think I picked some of the explanation in Japanese, but mostly followed the kid. And yes there is explanation on how to use the simulator in English if you win.

   We did everything, watched the diorama, we won the lottery, so did the simulator, ride the steam locomotive, there was a workshop to make keychain, did the one year anniversary rally that at the end spelled out “isshunen arigato (thanks for 1 year)”, watched train from the roof and obviously had to eat in the restaurant in a train wagon at the entrance and not inside the museum. I made sure we saw everything and asked it there is anything he wanted to see again (to change the flapping display was a huge hit and we went several time). In total we spent over 5 hours in the museum.

   I do not remember if there was QR and did not do audio guide as other commented (I do not doubt what other people said) and even without that, it was really worth it.

3. I have been to the Kyoto railway museum and I highly recommend it. They do have an English audio guide although the text for the displays, for the most part, includes English.

   It is a large museum and I needed at least three hours to see most of it. The railway roundhouse alone includes a lot of rolling stock. One of the interesting aspects of this museum, which you will see in other technology museums such as the Miraikan in Tokyo, is that they include extensive education displays. As you might expect, in the railway museum, the understanding of railway crossings involves real life, functional displays of working crossings.

   One aspect that I found particularly interesting was the walk under displays of various locomotives. If you are interested in the development of ticketing and scheduling systems, they have some truly ancient equipment on display.

   About the only part of the museum that I felt was a disappointment because of a lack of English was the day-in-the-life display of the Japanese rail system. In essence it is a gigantic model train set that represents all types of rail transport currently in use from bullet trains to local electric railways and everything in between. The show takes about 30 minutes and there is a light show and a narration. Perhaps you really don’t miss anything not understanding Japanese but there are so many types of trains that knowing the names might be interesting.

4. Kyoto Railway Museum as others have said does have a lot of content that’s not translated, but it’s still one of the best museums I’ve ever been to and you can definitely appreciate it just with the English content.

5. If you like trains then dont worry about english being spoken. Its a good venue and you have google

6. As others have already said, the Kyoto Railway Museum has an English audio guide. I wanted to add that this guide is fairly detailed, so you won’t feel as if you have missed any information by not being able to read Japanese.

7. The railway museum is pretty fantastic.

8. Google Translate is your friend. You can even translate text with it.

9. Oh man, I went to the Ainu museum waaaay back in 2006, it looked a lot different then. I remember some English translations even then when it was just a small facility. I can pretty much guarantee that they have English services now.
   Actually I just found a section for visitor services and yup, they have “multilingual support.” You can rent a little device that translates things for you. You’re good. 🙂