Research on the current situation and their prospects of maritime museums in Nagasaki prefecture [Japan]

Maritime museums are a type of institutions which hand down the maritime culture as well as materials and information, which were surrounding old-time fishery, to future generation. The maritime culture, including technique to make fishing tools or to master fish-catching methods, as well as the way of life for people in a fishing village had taken root throughout Japan. Debilitation of fishing villages in Nagasaki is progressing by decrease in fishery population. This depopulation is caused by the difficulty to obtain successors in addition to the aging of population. Today many children in fishing villages are leaving their hometown and do not succeed to their family business of fishery in the present sophisticated economic society and the increase in education level. The transient study about maritime affairs does not work well to foster successors to fishery. In order for the boat fishery in Nagasaki and all over Japan to expand, it is significant to inform young people the charm of fishery and to enlighten them about the maritime culture. It is thought that maritime museums, which are recording and intelligibly exhibiting the history of fishery, the origin of fishing gears and fish-catching methods, and their transition, greatly serve as maritime educational institutions. In order to serve a bridge between maritime museums and visitors, we conducted a research through interviews and questionnaires on the maritime museums in Nagasaki Prefecture as well as the utilization of museums by children. As a result of this research, we could reveal the particulars about museums' efforts, frequency of children's visit, and their awareness of maritime museums. In order to utilize the result of our research for mutual information exchange of maritime museums and for users' study or visits, we created the maritime museum guidebook of Nagasaki University version. We introduce a part of this guidebook as an introduction of the result of our research and a prospect based on the result.