Tsuboya Pottery Museum
Municipal museum built around a collapsed climbing kiln unearthed during construction, tracing centuries of local pottery.
This guide to the Tsuboya Pottery Museum in Okinawa follows nearly three hundred years of kilns that once forced every potter in the Ryukyu kingdom to work on this hillside, and a city order in the mid-1970s that finally silenced them. It traces the 1990s excavation that turned up a collapsed climbing kiln, Nishi-nu-kama, while Naha was breaking ground for the museum, and explains why builders chose to construct around it rather than clear it away. Upstairs you'll hear about awamori jars, glazed roof tiles and the shisa lions still watching over Okinawan doorways today. Stand on the lower level to see the kiln chamber left exactly as it was found.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.