Niche Museums

For 220 years between 1633 and 1853 Japan adopted a strictly isolationist foreign policy, with severely limited trade between Japan and other countries. One of the only exceptions was trade with the Dutch through a trading post on the artificial island of Dejima, first built in 1634 to house Portuguese traders but then repurposed for trade with the Dutch East India Company in 1641.

Isolation ended with the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1858 and Dejima merged into Nagasaki through land reclamation, but in 1922 it was designated a national historic site and intermittent efforts began to restore the island.

Today Dejima serves as a museum: many historic buildings have been restored, and the island hosts a scale model illustrating how it was laid out during the Edo period.

Burning since 1901, this bulb holds the record for the longest burning lightbulb. The Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department maintains the bulb in LPFD Station 6. The bulb was manufactured by the Shelby Electric Company in the late 1890s.

The bulb has been moved at least three times, most recently in 1976 when it was offline for 22 minutes before being installed in its current location.

One of five museums within Huis Ten Bosch, Japan’s 375 acre Netherlands-themed theme park near Nagasaki, Teddy Bear Kingdom celebrates the glamour of teddy bears.

Over 700 bears from all over the world are on display, including a Steiff bear made by the company that first popularized the toy in the early 1900s.

Did you know the teddy bear moniker was in honor President Theodore Roosevelt? He features in a sequence of dioramas that tell the history of the teddy bear.

Founded in 1946 by actor Dick Curtis - famous for playing the villain in a host of early westerns - as an 1880s themed living movie set. Hundreds of television shows and movies have been filmed here since.

The town has a population of 420 and it's occasionally possible to stay overnight (check Airbnb). Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace is a popular music venue on the edge of town that occasionally attracts surprise performances by big name stars.

T. E. Lawrence earned international fame thanks to the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, a dramatization of his World War I activities during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

Clouds Hill is his cottage in Dorset, bought in 1925 for use as a holiday home. Lawrence was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident near Clouds Hill in 1935, just two months after retiring from the army. Today the cottage is managed as a museum by the National Trust.

In continuous use since opening in 1890, this water-powered railway joins the two towns of Lynton (at the top) and Lynmouth (at the bottom). The 862 foot track covers an elevation of 500 feet making it highest and steepest of the three remaining water railways in the world - and the only one in the UK.

The two carriages are joined by a cable and act as counter-weights to each other, with the carriage at the top of the line filling up with water sourced from the nearby Lyn Valley to power the railway. The railway won the bronze award in Devon's Large Attraction of the Year 2018.

The only grade II listed model village in the UK. Opened in 1937, this one-ninth scale replica of Bourton-on-the-Water features miniature bonsai-style trees and bridges you can cross.

Stand close enough to the two churches to hear their choirs singing. Most satisfyingly, the model village includes a model of the model village, which itself includes a model of the model of the model village.

Starting in the 1820s, farmers from the area around Roscoff in Brittany started crossing the channel to sell onions in Wales and England. Known as Onion Johnnies, they became the stereotypical image of the French to the English, riding bicycles hung with onions and wearing berets and striped shirts. Their activity peaked in 1929 when over 9000 tonnes of onions were imported by nearly 1400 Johnnies.

Their golden age was ended by Import restrictions following World War II, but the trading relationship between Brittany and the UK was a key factor in the founding of Brittany Ferries operating out of Roscoff in the 1970s.

Today they are commemorated by the Onion Johnny museum in Roscoff, which hosts an annual Onion Festival (Fête de l'Oignon) every summer.

Neon Works is a neon sign fabrication and restoration business based in a 17,000-square-foot studio in North Oakland.

Founder Jim Rizzo also collects historic neon signs, and displays them in the workshop. Any time he hears about a Neon sign being taken down anywhere in the Bay Area Jim will swoop in and see what can be salvaged.

His collection has signs from throughout the previous century, including the 1500 pound 42 foot long Kilpatrick's Bakery sign rescued from 16th and Folsom street in San Francisco in the late 1990s.

Neon Works carried out the $70,000 restoration of the Castro Theatre’s 85 foot tall sign for the production of “Milk” in 2008.

The workshop is not open to the public, but occasionally hosts tours.

Can an entire island be classified as a niche museum? In Lundy's case I'd say yes. Accessible only by a twelve mile, two hour boat ride from north Devon, Lundy is a spectacular island in the Bristol Channel with a fascinating history.

The island has three light houses, a charming little village, a church, numerous ruins and a castle that was built in the 13th century by Henry III after he retook the island from the apparently traitorous William de Marisco.

Thanks to the Landmark Trust you can stay in many of the buildings (including the castle). Lundy is Britain's first Marine Conservation Zone, playing host to wildlife that includes puffins and Atlantic grey seals. It also offers excellent letterboxing.

jAdis is a shop, prop rental place and curiosity cabinet “dedicated to imagination and wonder”. Parke Meeke and Susan Lieberman opened Jadis on Main Street in the mid-1970s and began collecting and constructing objects along a theme that can best be described as a mad scientist laboratory. Items from jAdis have featured in movies such as The Artist, The Prestige, Batman and Robin, and Van Helsing along with many different TV shows.

Alexander Ivanov opened the Fabergé Museum in Baden-Baden in 2009 to host his collection of over 1,500 items made by Russian jewelry firm House of Fabergé. The firm was founded in 1842 and is most famous for making jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs for the Russian Tsars.

The museum holds at least one of those Imperial Easter Eggs - the Karelian Birch egg, which was ordered by the Tsar for Easter 1917 but was delivered after he had been deposed during the Russian revolution.

The museum also holds one of two known versions of the Constellation Egg, which it claims is the finished original. This claim is disputed.

Voted "Best Comic Store" in Best of the Bay for 17 years running (2002 - 2018), Isotope Comic Book Lounge plays host to a unique museum of toilet seats. The collection was founded by accident in 2002 when Brian Wood (DMZ and X-Men) vandalized their bathroom and owner James Sime kept the toilet seat. Over 100 comic artists have now contributed illustrated seats, and a subset of the collection can be seen lining the walls of the lounge.

A building of unknown origins. The conservatory was bought as a kit by James Lick for his estate in San Jose, then purchased as a gift for the city of San Francisco after his death in 1876. it was assembled as the first formal structure in Golden Gate Park in 1879. The origin of the kit itself is unknown, though it is thought to have come from somewhere in Europe.

Today it hosts over 1,700 plant species, including some rare tropical plants that are over 100 years old and the world’s largest public collection of high-altitude orchids. Their Corpse Flowers attract a substantial crowd when they bloom for 2-3 days every 7-10 years.

Relocated from NASA Glenn Research Center to a new home inside the Great Lakes Science Center in 2010, this is one of just eleven NASA visitor centers in the USA. See inside the Apollo Command Module used in the 1973 Skylab 3 mission and celebrate Ohio's status as the fourth-largest producer of astronauts in the United States (25 astronauts so far).