In May 2026, a small aquarium opened inside a century-old townhouse in Obama, Fukui — tanks lined up on tatami mats in what used to be somebody’s living room. It was built by university students. One of them had been saying, to anyone who would listen, that he wanted to open an aquarium despite having no money at all; a property owner across the street had an empty building and no idea what to do with it. The two wishes met, and the project started moving.
This second report from Obama takes in that aquarium, a free museum devoted to the Saba Kaido — the “Mackerel Road” that fed the imperial court in Kyoto — and a workshop where you grind down layers of lacquer to reveal a pair of chopsticks that exists nowhere else. There is a one-day walking route at the end.
The first article in this series is here: Obama Nishigumi, the mermaid legend and the machiya cafes.
Fish Tanks on Tatami: The Aquarium Students Built
Obama Aquarium opened on 1 May 2026 in Sanchomachi, in the heart of the Nishigumi preservation district, using an old machiya townhouse essentially as it stood.
On the ground floor, the tanks stand on the original bare earthen floor.
Up the stairs, the display continues — here small tanks are arranged in a tatami room so you can sit down and watch.
All told there are around 30 tanks holding roughly 60 species: pufferfish from Obama Bay, ararekako goby from the city’s rivers, and tropical fish such as clownfish. A net once used for isaza fishing hangs on display, and small touches like a fish-shaped door reward a second look.
“I Have No Money, But I Want to Build an Aquarium”
The founder is Kiichiro Makabe, a student in the Department of Advanced Aquaculture Science at Fukui Prefectural University’s Faculty of Marine Bioscience — in his fourth year at the time of our visit. He grew up in Takatsuki, near Osaka, and had been in Obama about two years when the idea took hold.
Most of the buildings around this stretch of Sanchomachi were empty. The owner of the property opposite felt something had to be done but had no idea what. Meanwhile Makabe kept repeating that he had no money but wanted to build an aquarium. The two were introduced, and the project began.
The arrangement is unusual: the owner covers the building work and the aquarium equipment, and the students cover running costs — sourcing the fish, producing the merchandise.
Every Tank Has a Student in Charge of It
What makes the place work is how many students from the university’s Obama campus are involved. Each individual tank has a student responsible for it.
Students can even rent a tank and stock it with whatever they like, which is why every tank has its own character and its own handwritten card.
About 40 students are involved. The Obama campus has three year groups of 80 to 90 students each — just under 300 in total — so more than one in ten has a hand in the aquarium. The building next door houses students, with a kitchen and shower downstairs and rooms above.
Why an Aquarium?
We asked Makabe what led him to this particular idea.
Explaining aquaculture research — beakers, measuring cylinders, testing fish — does not land with most people, he said. But managing a tank, he reckoned, might be the clearest way to show what raising fish actually involves. The place was set up as a base for students, so learning had to stay at the centre of it. Follow that logic, and you arrive at an aquarium.
Makabe has wanted to be a fisherman since he was small. Wanting a second occupation to go alongside it, and wanting to live where fishermen live, he first set up a share house — since handed on to younger students — and then this. “I always thought I’d start something like this in my fifties,” he told us. “It just happened to come early.”
“The building has the atmosphere of a cultural property, and the students bring this uncomplicated enthusiasm for fish,” he said. “I’d say the two have fused rather well here.”
Use It as Your Base for Walking the Old Town
Here is the practical tip: your ¥700 (yen) ticket lets you come and go all day. You can wander the preserved streets and the cafes of Nishigumi, then duck back in to cool off and look at the tanks again. In midsummer that is worth knowing.
Obama Aquarium
Address: 55 Obama Katori, Obama City, Fukui Prefecture
Open: 10:00–16:00 (last entry 16:00)
Closed: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (open Thursday to Sunday)
Admission: ¥700 (yen) general / ¥300 (yen) high school age and under / free for pre-school children / ¥100 (yen) for Obama residents
Re-entry permitted all day on the same ticket
Check the days before you build a plan around this one. The aquarium opens only Thursday through Sunday — it is run by students around their studies. If you are coming to Obama early in the week, the townhouse streets and the food museum below are still open, but the aquarium will not be.
The students’ faculty studies marine products and fisheries resources. The Wakasa region around Obama, with its deeply indented ria coastline and natural harbours, has prospered from the sea for a very long time — which brings us to the next stop.
Mikketsukuni: The Province That Fed the Imperial Court
Obama and the wider Wakasa region were, geographically, the closest fishing grounds to Kyoto. That made this an official Mikketsukuni — one of three provinces charged with supplying food to the imperial court, alongside Shima (now Mie) and Awaji (now Hyogo).
The Wakasa Obama Mikketsukuni Food Culture Museum lays out that history, and admission is free — which, on a hot day, makes it doubly attractive.
Mikketsukuni (御食国) literally means “province of the imperial food”. In the ancient ritsuryo system, certain coastal provinces paid their tax to the court in seafood and salt rather than rice. Obama held that role for centuries — which is why a small port town on the Sea of Japan has a museum of national food history in it.
The Mackerel Road: “Kyoto Is Far, But Only Eighteen Ri”
The route that carried Obama’s catch to the capital was the Saba Kaido. On display is the old saying “Kyo wa toote mo juhachi-ri” — “Kyoto may be far, but it is only eighteen ri” (about 72km). It was what the porters of Wakasa told themselves, hauling heavy loads over mountain paths.
There were several variants. The busiest was the Wakasa Kaido through the post town of Kumagawa-juku; others included the steep Harihata pass — the shortest line — and the Nishi-Omi road down the western shore of Lake Biwa.
This is not only history. The Saba Kaido Ultramarathon runs about 77km from Obama to Demachiyanagi in Kyoto, crossing three mountains of 800m or more; the 31st edition was held in May 2026. Local primary schools still send children to walk to Kyoto over two days.
People are still crossing those mountains on their own feet, along the road the fish once travelled. It changes how you look at it.
A Town That Made Food Its Policy
Inside the hall, a full-size old house has been reconstructed — the same machiya form described in our first article, complete with the firewall at the boundary with the neighbours.
Fish hang drying outside it, and the table inside is set with mackerel marinated in a soy-based sauce and dried — the everyday cooking of a community that lived well off the sea at its door.
In August 2000, Obama made food the centre of its regional policy, and in 2001 it enacted Japan’s first municipal ordinance on food-based town planning. This museum, opened in September 2003, was built as the hub of that programme — not as a tourist attraction, which is partly why the displays go as deep as they do.
The Canned Mackerel That Went to Space
Mackerel here is everyday food, cooked every way imaginable. Hamayaki saba — a whole fatty mackerel on a skewer, grilled slowly without seasoning — is the local speciality.
The museum also displays a can of mackerel that went into orbit. Students at what was then Obama Fisheries High School (now Wakasa High School) worked on it over many years, and in 2018 it received JAXA certification as Japanese Space Food. Space food has requirements ordinary canning does not — a thickness that stops liquid escaping in zero gravity, and stability over long storage — and they solved them in class. The story was dramatised by Fuji TV as Sabakan, Uchu e Iku (“Canned Mackerel Goes to Space”), which ran in the network’s Monday 9pm slot from 13 April 2026, starring Takumi Kitamura.
Saba-zushi, mackerel cured in salt and vinegar and pressed onto sushi rice, is said to have begun on this very road: before refrigeration, salted mackerel carried from Wakasa arrived in Kyoto having cured to just the right point along the way.
When we visited, the displays ran from the origins of sushi to a collection of osechi New Year dishes gathered from across Japan, each region with its own flavours and ingredients.
Wakasa Obama Mikketsukuni Food Culture Museum
Address: 3-4 Kawasaki, Obama City, Fukui Prefecture
Open: 9:00–18:00 (9:00–17:00 from November to the end of February)
Admission: free
Closed: Wednesdays (open if a public holiday), 28 December – 5 January
Access: 20 minutes on foot from JR Obama Station; 8 minutes by car from the Obama interchange, parking available
Eating the Mackerel: Wakasa Fisherman’s Wharf
Having read about it, we went to eat it. Wakasa Fisherman’s Wharf faces the sea nearby: it is the departure point for the Sotomo sightseeing cruise, and it sells souvenirs from Obama and the wider prefecture.
Local specialities include kodai no sasazuke (small sea bream cured and packed in cedar barrels), mackerel sushi, and Wakasa lacquered chopsticks.
Upstairs, the restaurant Kaikoen serves seafood landed at the port in front of it.
We ordered the hamayaki saba set meal, ¥3,300 (yen) (approx. $22) — the dish we had just been reading about downstairs: a whole fatty mackerel run through with bamboo skewers and grilled slowly over charcoal.
It arrives unseasoned; you eat it with ginger soy sauce, which cuts cleanly through a very rich fish. Excellent. The Obama-don, ¥2,500 (yen) (approx. $17), is another option worth having this close to a working port.
The Sotomo Cruise Along the Cliffs
We missed this one — the weather was against us — but the Sotomo sightseeing cruise leaves from directly in front of Fisherman’s Wharf and comes highly recommended.
The coast here is a ria coastline — unusual on the Sea of Japan side — and the cruise runs roughly 60 minutes along about 6km of dramatic cliffs and sea caves to the scenic Sotomo rock formations.
Grinding Your Own Chopsticks: The Wakasa Lacquer Workshop
Back on the second floor of the food museum, you can try the finishing stage of Wakasa-nuri lacquerware — the grinding that brings out the pattern. It is popular, particularly at weekends. I had a go.
Wakasa lacquer is said to have begun when a lacquer master of the Obama domain designed patterns based on the seabed of Wakasa Bay. Jewel-like and once reserved for court nobles, samurai households and wealthy merchants, it survives today above all in chopsticks: Wakasa produces more lacquered chopsticks than anywhere else in Japan, around 80% of the domestic market.
The process starts by building texture with shell, eggshell, pine needles and gold or silver leaf, then layering coloured lacquer over it more than ten times. Grinding it back with stone and charcoal makes the buried pattern surface. The workshop lets you do that final grinding, with a lacquer craftsman beside you — no experience needed.
You start by choosing a pair of chopsticks already built up in many layers, with shell and eggshell buried in the coloured lacquer. What pattern emerges is not yet known.
The technique is simple enough. You lay the chopstick on a board, thumb on top, and slide it against sandpaper, rotating it to work evenly around the whole surface. When the emerging line joins up all the way round, you wet it and finish that section. It takes more force than you expect — enough that you swap hands to avoid tiring one arm.
As the dust comes off, you rinse and smooth with a cloth, and different colours start to appear. Look closely and the shell pattern is surfacing. After about ten minutes, the difference from where you started is obvious.
Wetting and working further, the shell finally reads clearly. Then you start the second chopstick. Twenty-five minutes after beginning, both are even, and you rinse them clean.
The striking thing is that more grinding is not better. The pattern that appears depends on how far you go, so where you stop decides the result — which means no two pairs come out the same, even from identical blanks.
A craftsman then finishes the pair with proper tools, and the chopsticks you ground yourself are done.
Completing something with your own hands makes for a souvenir with a story. The second floor also sells finished lacquered chopsticks across a wide range of prices — an easy gift, and swapping your everyday chopsticks for something a little special changes the feel of a meal more than you would think.
Wakasa lacquer chopstick-grinding workshop (Wakasa Kobo, 2nd floor of the Food Culture Museum)
Duration: about 40 minutes
Price: around ¥1,500 (yen) — reservation required, by phone or through the web form
Other workshops include Wakasa agate craft, and papermaking in Wakasa washi (both decorative sheets and postcards). Check the official site for details.
Sessions must be booked ahead and the schedule varies, so confirm before you build a day around it. If you would rather not commit, the museum below is free and the chopsticks are on sale upstairs either way.
A Bath With a Sea View, Three Floors Up
The same building holds Hama no Yu, a bathing facility on the third floor (reception is on the first). Its open-air bath and seaweed bath are the draw — the latter nicknamed the “bath of eternal youth” — and there is a restaurant and sauna. The sunset from the open-air bath is reportedly the highlight.
Japanese public baths are enjoyed unclothed, and you wash thoroughly at the taps before entering the water. Tattoos are restricted at some facilities; if you have one, it is worth asking at reception first.
One Day in Obama: A Suggested Route
If you want to fit the aquarium, the museum, grilled mackerel and the chopstick workshop into a single day, this is roughly how it works.
10:00 — Arrive at JR Obama Station
10:00–10:20 — Walk to Nishigumi and Sanchomachi (about 20 minutes)
10:20 — Obama Aquarium (about 40 minutes)
11:00 — Wander the preserved streets and cafes (about 45 minutes)
11:45–12:00 — Walk to the Kawasaki district (about 15 minutes, passing Mermaid Terrace and Ningyo-no-hama beach)
12:00 — Wakasa Fisherman’s Wharf: souvenirs and lunch (about 60 minutes)
13:00–13:05 — Walk to the Food Culture Museum (about 5 minutes)
13:05 — Museum (free, about 50 minutes)
14:00 — Chopstick-grinding at Wakasa Kobo, 2nd floor (about 40 minutes; confirm availability and start times)
14:45 — Bathe at Hama no Yu and shop for souvenirs (about 45 minutes)
15:30–15:50 — Walk back to JR Obama Station (about 20 minutes)
These are rough guides. You could also add the Sotomo cruise, or from the first article, Kuin-ji with its cave, and the machiya cafe 39 Shokudo.
Closing days to watch: the aquarium opens Thursday to Sunday only (closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday); the Food Culture Museum and Wakasa Kobo close on Wednesdays; Hama no Yu closes on the third Wednesday of each month.
From an aquarium built on student enthusiasm, to the food culture the Mackerel Road created, to a pair of chopsticks that exists only because you ground them yourself — Obama rewards the traveller who wants to do something rather than just look at it.
The Obama Series
Four reports from this port town on the Sea of Japan, two hours north of Kyoto:
1. Meiji streets, a mermaid legend and Fukui’s last geisha quarter
2. A student-run aquarium, and the road that fed the imperial court (this article)
Story and photos by Keigo Kamada
Tetsudo Channel — Travel & Weekend Outings
the Orijinal article(Japanese) https://tetsudo-ch.com/13033809.html 無一文の大学生が町家を水族館に!? 福井･小浜の珍しい水族館、世界に一つだけの塗り箸制作体験、鯖街道の御食国など 小浜観光レポ 第2弾