Weird and wonderful

Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation depended for its mastery on a sense of two characters lost together in the alien culture of Japan – a sense that is all-too-easily recreated by undertaking a search for a parasite museum in 38-degree heat and 90 per cent humidity.

There can be few countries on the planet that have such a penchant for strange museums as Japan, and a lot of them are in Tokyo. The city has a laundry museum, where you can look at old clothes dryers and pegs, and one dedicated to socks, where you might get lucky and find that argyle one that went missing in the wash.

A couple of years ago, bathroom-ware manufacturer Toto set up a temporary toilet museum in one of its showrooms (apparently the loos made for sumo wrestlers are super-sized).

Perhaps this museum mania is born from the fact Japanese homes are small and there are few back gardens where a man can keep a shed. All those weird bits and bobs that are elsewhere hidden away in the privacy of a person’s store cupboard – 200 Bulgarian corkscrews, say, or an extensive collection of pre-war English outboard motors – need to be housed somewhere.

That somewhere may as well be a museum, where admission fees can be charged.