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The focus of Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design is a permanent exhibition of seventy-four traditional crafts of the Kyoto region. These cover a wide range of very different crafts – woodworking, weaving, fabric dying, the making of singing bowls, the carving of funerary sculptures, etc.

With seventy-four crafts to display in a single room, there’s a limit to how much space each one can get. Some are just displays of particularly exquisite examples of the craft, but many are explained in a lot of detail, such as step-by-step displays of the process of making wooden doll, or exhibits showing the various techniques of dying kimono fabric. The focus was on the craftsmanship and the process. I could happily have walked through three times the space to see more detail of each of the crafts.

There were also multiple hands-on exhibits, where you could try wrapping different kinds of items in a furoshiki cloth, or enjoy the sounds of a tuned series of singing bowls.