Naramachi Karakuri Toy Museum

This guide to the Naramachi Karakuri Toy Museum in Nara traces the modest wooden house's earlier lives, first as the annex of a restaurant in a quarter once home to Nara's calendar-making diviners, then as the Matsuya family's private tea room with a sunken hearth. You'll hear how a retired Nara University professor spent more than twenty years hand-restoring bamboo and paper karakuri toys from Edo-period drawings and texts, and how traces of the old tea service still hide in the carved transom above the doors. Nothing here sits behind glass, so look for the toy that only rings its bell when sand falls through it just right.