Nintendo Museum Opens in a Former Factory in Uji

The Nintendo Museum opened on 2 October 2024 in Uji, a city just south of Kyoto. It occupies the former Uji Ogura Plant, a factory that Nintendo built in 1969 to make playing cards and later used for repairs. The company, founded in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of hanafuda cards, has kept its headquarters in the city ever since, and the museum is its first public account of its own history.

What is inside

The upper floor is the display: every major product the company has released, arranged by generation, from hanafuda and Western playing cards through the toys of the 1960s and 1970s to the Famicom, the Game Boy, the Wii and the Switch. Consoles are shown alongside their regional variants and their games. There are few explanatory texts, and the display is designed so that visitors find the connections between products for themselves.

The ground floor holds the interactive exhibits, in which old products are replayed at a different scale or with new technology: oversized controllers that need two people to operate, a shooting gallery based on a 1970s light-gun game, and a batting cage inspired by a toy pitching machine from 1968. Each visitor receives a fixed number of digital coins to spend, which is not enough to try everything.

A workshop lets visitors make or play hanafuda cards, with a separate reservation and fee. There is a café and a shop with items sold nowhere else.

Tickets

Tickets are not sold at the door. They are allocated by a random draw: applications open on the museum’s website about three months ahead, and successful applicants then pay for a timed entry. Any unsold slots are released for direct sale afterwards. The museum is open from 10:00 to 18:00 and closed on Tuesdays and over the New Year holiday.

Getting there

The museum is five minutes on foot from Ogura Station on the Kintetsu Kyoto Line and eight minutes from JR Ogura Station on the Nara Line, each around 20 to 30 minutes from Kyoto Station. There is no visitor parking and Nintendo asks visitors to come by train.

Uji deserves more than the museum. The Byodo-in temple, whose Phoenix Hall appears on the ten-yen coin, and the tea shops along the river are a few stops further down the line, and the two fit easily in a day from Kyoto.