COOL JAPANESE SCENE

The museum, part of Bungo Takada's "Showa Town" project to preserve and showcase buildings and shops from Japan's Showa Era (the time when Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as the Showa Emperor, reigned from 1926-89) as a tourist attraction, opened in 2002.

"My father was a bureaucrat for the Fukuoka Prefectural Government, and back then, bureaucrats were poorly paid," Komiya recalled one recent afternoon at a cafe next to the museum after busloads of mostly middle-aged group tourists left. Read more...

Tunes gone by: Record covers of singers from the 1970s and '80s, including Momoe Yamaguchi and Pink Lady, as well as covers for theme songs of the era's superhero TV programs, adorn the museum's walls. TOMOKO OTAKE PHOTOS

Then one day, during another trip to Osaka, he spotted five 2-cm tin cars — once freebies with caramels marketed by Ezaki Glico Co. — sitting unloved and unappreciated between antique pots and plates in a secondhand store. After talking to the store owner, he was able to scoop up the lot for ¥200 and, as they say, the rest is history — or in Komiya's case, the foundation of a collection that has just continued growing ever since.

Finally, turning his hobby into his living, Komiya opened a dagashiya (penny-candy store) in Fukuoka 20 years ago and started asking wholesalers to sell him other freebies. Today, though, he says he finds his best bargains via Internet auctions.

However, Komiya insists that his criteria for choosing what to collect are clearly different from those of hard-core otaku (obsessive) collectors. He picks toys, he says, that resonate with his own childhood memories or what he thinks would appeal to his friends and acquaintances. "Obsessives would try to collect all the bottles with different serial numbers," he said. "I don't pay attention to such details. I think just having one bottle of each kind is fine."

Ship shape: A wartime poster urging men to sign up for the Imperial Japanese Navy

He also encourages visitors to touch the objects on display, which are all original. But he has regretfully had to put certain items in glass cases, after discovering that some light-fingered visitors took some toys away with them.

To encourage visitors to re-connect with the Japan gone by, Komiya opened another museum last year, named Showa-no-yume-machi 3-chome-kan (Showa's Dream Town on the Third Street). There, visitors can experience the lifestyles of people living in that era through his recreations of old-style housing — a living room with a black-and-white TV, a period kitchen (with a tap that actually gushes water) and a Japanese-style toilet from where visitors hear the voice of a grandpa calling for more paper.

Visitors' reactions to the exhibits have been varied, Komiya says. While many simply marvel at the sheer volume of his collection, he recalls one elderly visitor telling him that "the Showa Era was not as rosy as this."

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