Day 6 PM : Otaru Music Box Museum

Otaru Music Box Museum is housed in a century-old red-brick building which used to be the warehouse of a rice supplier. In front of the building stands a steam clock 5.5 meters high and weighs 1.5 tons and is powered entirely by steam. The clock plays a chime every 15 minutes and blows a steam whistle every hour to tell the time.

Otaru Music Box Museum and Steam Clock (left).
Entrance to the Otaru Music Box Museum is free.

On the second floor, you can learn about the development of music boxes and find antique music boxes of various kinds exhibited and sold with a high price tag.

Overview of the second floor of museum.

One of the displays featuring the development of music boxes from 1600s to 1900s.

All the musical boxes are so pretty and intricate!
It took us almost an hour to complete the tour around the floor.

The museum shop on the ground floor is the biggest shop in Japan which specialized in music boxes. Pretty cool to just browse around cos there is such a wide variety of music boxes on sale!

Small and intricate 'transparent' music boxes where you can see the mechanics inside.

Beautiful dolls.

Cute maneki neko (fortune cats).

Musical jewelry boxes.

Left: Carousel-styled music box that I like but didn't buy cos it's terribly expensive.
Right: Glass angels ornaments