Higashisonogi Town History and Folklore Museum

The museum stands in a history park at Higashisonogi, on the eastern shore of Omura Bay in Nagasaki Prefecture. The park was laid out around Hisagozuka, a kofun or burial mound that is among the largest in the prefecture and is a designated historic site.

Sonogi lies on the neck of land between the Ariake Sea and Omura Bay, and from Omura Bay a ship could reach the open sea and the mainland of Asia beyond. That position made it the centre of the bay's coastline in early times, and later a post town on the Nagasaki Kaido, the road that carried traffic between Nagasaki and the rest of the country.

The museum is in two parts. The history side runs from the old stone age, more than ten thousand years back, through the Yayoi and Kofun periods, when the district was at its most important, to the Edo period and the opening of new rice fields on a large scale. It also covers Sonogi tea, which is still grown here.

The other side holds the culture of the town as a stop on the road, and the local performing arts, among them the puppet theatre.

Upstairs there is a relief model of the country around: a green triangle for Mount Tara, grey-white for Kokuzo, an ellipse at the base for Omura Bay, with the dunes and rocky shore shaped along the coast and a curved sheet of acrylic standing for the waves.

Besides the mound and the museum there is a farmhouse of the Meiji period, and a workshop where visitors could make pottery and magatama beads, which is closed at present.