Personal Museum of Natural History

Instead of displaying bones or stuffed dead animals, we offer you our collections of photographs, taken in Japan and other places including Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Bhutan, Suriname, Namibia, Gabon, Polynesian Islands, France, Greece and Australia, among others. Every picture displayed here represents (in principle) a living creature we saw at a certain place on the globe, and at a certain moment in our life - so we named this site "personal museum" because its collections also consist of our personal favoritism, experiences and memories.

We are not birders or collectors who look all over the world for rarest species to make their "life list" more complete. Rather, we are usual walkers or travellers just looking for unexpected encounters. We take a photo simply when we feel happy to see something, and basically don't care how rare it is. That is why you find here many pictures of tree sparrows or house cats, and milk cows are displayed next to chamois. (For details of our policies, please click/tap on the blue "+" icon at the top right of a gallery page).

At the moment, the museum contains 6 sectors and each sector has 20 to 100+ galleries. Choose a sector from the list below to proceed further. For practical reasons, fungi and myxomycetes are found in "plants" sector for now, like real museums of old times.

In addition to the 6 sectors, there are also kind of 'Branches' : a photoblog called "wildlife portrait archive", where photos in bigger formats are posted, and a Facebook page, which is basically a reproduction of the photoblog. I am regularly posting 'representational abstract' photos - which have nothing to do with living things - to ello, too.

Since a couple of years, we are redoing the whole website. For now, only the 'birds', 'mammals' and 'plants' sectors are published in the new design/format as it takes a lot of time. You will find many out-of-date pages here and there but (believe us) they are not abandoned !

But wait a minute. No matter how much we renovate the exhibition rooms, there is still the process of identifying and posting the photos on them, which is also behind schedule. This is why you often see “Coming Shortly” signs when you visit the site. At this point, the following table shows the progress.

Due to the renovation, we are now temporarily suspending the listing of organisms other than plants and animals (including fungi). After the renovation, we plan to reorganize each room in a manner more in line with the latest findings in taxonomy.