Gunkanjima Digital Museum — Attraction in Nagasaki

This museum is nice, but I also felt it wasn't impressive for the fairly high price. It's ¥1800 for an adult (¥1500 if you have a ticket for Glover Garden, so make sure to go there first.) They do have an audio guide, but it's main purpose is to translate the opening speech from the video that plays every half hour at the entrance to the museum. It doesn't provide description for most of the exhibits, and for those it does have something about its very brief. Additionally, the technology already feels somewhat old. The use of VR sounds impressive, but in practice it's so limited to the point that it would have been easier to just have traditional displays. You can't even move freely. I hate to be so down on it because it really is an interesting museum and it does have a lot of good information on the island. The most interesting part, for me, was the interviewing with former residents of the island. When it comes down to it maybe that's my point: a lot of the digital tech isn't even effective, in contrast to the direct imparting of life experience by those who lived it. If those elements had been incorporated better, that might make for a truly...

I didn't know anything about Gunkanjima going into this, so this is from an outsider's perspective. This museum is about an island where coal mining was done before WWII until the 1960s. It was abandoned and is a well preserved artifact of the time, which is quite interesting. What they don't tell you is that it was slave labor camp for Koreans and Chinese (there's a small corner of the museum refuting this). This made it very uncomfortable to stand in the kids room where hundreds of childrens drawings of the island mascot filled the walls. After learning more the only way I can view this museum is as propaganda to draw attention away from the dark side and towards the admittedly interesting and valuable time capsule that it is. Also it's 1800 yen which is way too expensive. I would skip this if you are a...

We were told that our prebooked trip to visit this almost mythical existence called the Gunkanjima Island was cancelled. We were devastated. HOWEVER, they said we can visit their Digital Museum for half the price. Since we already traveled all the way we thought there’s nothing to lose. We went and was pleasantly surprised in the creativity and the effort put in to let visitors feel as if we have been there ourselves. The 4/f was the highlight. I recommend going there first and work your way down. It’s the next best thing to actually visiting the island. Actually, it’s worth a visit even if you have physically visited the island. There are places you cannot enter because of safety reasons, but in the digital experience, you can visit and see the...