Osaka City Sewerage Science Museum
The Osaka City Sewerage Science Museum is a museum next to the Yodo river. Learn something about the sewerage system and get a gift!
This is a museum about Osaka’s sewer system, how they work and what would happen without them. It’s a museum rich in medial presentation and educational games. In other words: a typical place for a class trip.
No school classes were around when I visited the museum on my last stop before heading to Tokyo. This is not a museum that sees a massive number of visitors from foreign countries.
Sewer Time!
The Sewerage Science Museum is admission free and has no lockers. When arriving at the ground floor, be sure to pick up the manhole cover stamp disk. This was next to the elevators when I visited. This disk has nine places for stamps.
Floor 4 has six stamps alone, while the 3rd, first (ground) and underground floor feature one stamp each. These are engraving stamps, so they’re useless with a normal stamp book.
Exhibits
All interactive exhibits and films offer English subtitles. Written descriptions are however Japanese-only.
The games offer some variety, asking you to jump, move or touch. There is a scoring system as well to show how you performed in saving Osaka.
Saving Osaka? But I’m coming from Tokyo! The games aren’t too challenging and I did decently. Kids would probably ace them. One touchscreen game even offered a two player mode.
Photo Spots
The top floor has two photo spots: A flowery recreation of the Osaka Castle manhole and an incomplete writing of the word sewer/sewer system. You need at least three people to complete the three kanji and form 下水道 (gesuidou).
You can also look outside, but the view isn’t special.
Manhole covers & Kinnikuman
On the first underground floor is an exhibition showing sewer pipes and robots devised to traverse these pipes. But the main attraction – especially to foreign visiors – are probably the commemorative manhole covers.
The number of artistic manhole covers has grown rapidly since the 80s. They not only including the city’s iconic buildings or logo, but also popular characters that have a connection to the city. There’re also a lot of Pokémon manhole covers, with their location doubling as a Pokéstop.
Similar to a stamp rally, you can try to get all special manhole covers or just be surprised to find one somewhere in the city. For example, you can find some Sailor Moon lids in Tokyo, while Osaka City is ruled by the mighty Kinnikuman.
Kinnikuman is the story of the titular superhero who is a prince of the planet Kinniku. In order to prove himself worthy of the throne, he enters wrestling tournaments.
Besides various designs of Osaka Castle, Kinnikuman was also the first artistic manhole cover I found in Osaka.
A gift from the Sewerage Science Museum
Finishing the stamp rally and a short survey, I got a free manhole card with the location of the manhole and some text on the background. It’s a collectible.
There’s also a commemorative manhole cover for the museum itself, at Yodogawa station. Yodogawa is the closest station to the station and is a stop on the Hanshin Main Line.
