The museum owes its existence to one of the twentieth century's great spectacles. In 1970, Osaka hosted the Japan World Exposition -- Expo '70 -- under the theme "Progress and Harmony for Mankind." Over six months, 64 million visitors streamed through a site that showcased Japan's postwar ambitions on a grand scale. When the fair closed, most of its futuristic pavilions were demolished. But the grounds in Suita, now known as Expo Commemoration Park, found new purpose. The museum was established in 1974 by its founding director, the ethnologist and explorer Umesao Tadao, who envisioned an institution that would go far beyond displaying artifacts. He wanted a place where the world's cultures could be studied, documented, and understood. Three years later, in 1977, Minpaku opened its doors to the public.

Kurokawa's design for the museum is a study in controlled contradiction. The exterior presents a fortress of windowless reinforced concrete -- four stories above ground, one below -- arranged as interconnected L-shaped blocks that cluster around interior patios. Sunlight enters only through these courtyards, creating contemplative pockets of sky within a sealed environment. The Metabolist philosophy holds that buildings should function like biological organisms, capable of regeneration and growth. True to this principle, Minpaku has been extended multiple times since its construction without any sense of awkwardness. The museum sits in conversation with the park's most famous survivor, Okamoto's Tower of the Sun, which rises nearby -- a 70-meter monument with three faces representing past, present, and future. Together, the tower and the museum form an unlikely pair: one wild and expressionistic, the other disciplined and expansive.

The permanent galleries are organized into three blocks that span the globe. Block A covers Oceania, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Block B shifts to music and languages, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Block C explores Central and Northern Asia, the Korean Peninsula, China's regional cultures, the Ainu people, and Japan itself. The founding collection, known as the Attic Collection, was assembled by Keizo Shibusawa in the early twentieth century and includes Japanese ethnological materials alongside Jomon-era archaeological artifacts from the Morse Collection. But the museum's ambitions extend well beyond static display. Its researchers have emphasized film, sound recordings, still images, and everyday objects -- farming tools, religious implements, folk crafts, food preparation vessels -- that capture the texture of daily life rather than just ceremonial grandeur.

Minpaku is not merely a museum; it is Japan's largest research institute in the humanities and social sciences. It offers doctoral courses through the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), placing students in research positions across the country. Its library holds one of Japan's most extensive multilingual academic reference collections, with materials in Japanese, English, Chinese, Spanish, French, and numerous other languages, all linked to a national network of university libraries. The museum publishes several academic journals, including the Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology and the Senri Ethnological Studies series, which has become a standard reference in ethnographic scholarship worldwide. As a founding member of the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU), Minpaku anchors a research ecosystem that extends far beyond its physical walls.

What makes Minpaku remarkable is the ambition folded into its quiet setting. Here, on the site where Japan once announced itself to the postwar world through spectacle and engineering, the country turned inward to ask a different question: what can we learn from how other people live? Umesao Tadao's vision endures in every gallery -- the understanding that an Indonesian rice-planting tool or an African musical instrument is as worthy of serious study as any masterwork in a fine art museum. For the visitor arriving from the park's broad lawns, past the cherry trees and Okamoto's defiant sculpture, Minpaku offers something increasingly rare: a place built on the conviction that curiosity about other cultures is itself a form of progress.