The Miraikan Emerging Science Museum, opened in 2001, is an institution dedicated to promoting Japan’s role in the development of science, technology, and innovation. Across seven floors, the museum explores the pressing questions for the worlds of today and tomorrow. 

Located a short walk from Tokyo Teleport station on Tokyo Bay’s manmade Aomi island, the museum contains three permanent exhibition halls: ‘Create your future’, ‘Explore the frontiers’, and ‘Discover your Earth’. Alongside these exhibitions are three theaters, a rotating permanent exhibition, and three cafe/picnic spaces. 

Entering the museum, visitors are first presented with a massive atrium featuring a 6-meter diameter model of the globe floating 12 meters above the ground. The globe consists of 10,362 LED panels displaying live-updating imagery of the earth. Twice an hour, the globe displays an educational documentary on the subjects of Geology, Sociology, Data, and Earthquakes. 

The lobby space also contains the museum’s gift store, which uses cutting-edge machine vision to detect what visitors pick up from shelves for a seamless shopping experience. Alongside classic science museum gifts like desk toys and astronaut ice cream, the museum promotes futureproof food sources by stocking a wide range of products containing insects.

The ‘Create your future’ exhibition opens with a series of questions for visitors posed by Nobel Laureates, before guiding the visitor through different zones exploring Aging, Quantum Computing, Robotics, and AI. The section on aging is particularly relevant to Japan, whose growing elderly population poses a problem for a country with rapidly declining birth rates. 

The floor above, ‘Explore the frontiers’, centers on the relationships between human society, biology, and planetary science. Apart from the 1:1 recreation of an ISS module, my favorite section of this exhibition was ‘The Universe: Unread Messages’ which explains how networks of ground and space-based telescopes and detectors such as Hubble, Super-Kamiokande, CERN, and the IceCube Neutrino observatory work together to investigate unexpected events and make new discoveries like Gravitational Waves, Neutrino events, and Blazars.

‘Discover your earth’ surrounds the museum’s five-storey atrium, expanding on and interacting with the 6-metre LED globe described above. The museum also houses a massive planetarium dome theatre, with regular screenings of educational films about the oceans, earth, universe, and quantum physics. Nearby, the Innovation Hall theatre houses an immersive space with wall-to-floor projections that take visitors on a tour through the clouds.

The museum’s current special exhibition centers on Japanese exploration of the Antarctic, celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the First Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition in 1956. The exhibition contains interactive displays about Aurora, Ice floes, living spaces, Meteorite research, and blizzards.

Open daily from 10:00 – 5:00 (closed Tuesdays), the Miraikan is an exciting and educational experience with a surprising level of depth and cutting-edge displays and plenty of explanations in English alongside Japanese. Perfect for families and experts alike, this museum is real proof that Japan is living in the future.