Hiroshima: Museum Commemorating Battleship Yamato Closed for Renovation; Overcrowding Causing Safety Issues

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:09 JST, March 8, 2025

KURE, Hiroshima — The Yamato Museum in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, has been closed and will undergo extensive renovation work until the end of March 2026.

The museum, which commemorates the battleship Yamato and its shipbuilding technology, has recently seen a large boom in popularity. Visitors have been coming in excess of the numbers anticipated when the museum was built, resulting in the air conditioning system and other facilities being pushed beyond capacity.

Yamato was the world’s largest battleship at the time of the Pacific War. The museum, which opened in April 2005, was designed to accommodate 400,000 visitors in its first fiscal year and 200,000 visitors each year after that.

However, the facility attracted 1.6 million visitors in the first fiscal year and 800,000-900,000 visitors annually then on due to the popularity of such crowd-pleasing exhibits as a 1:10 scale model of the Yamato.

Safety issues have been raised about the overcrowding.

The planned renovation work includes a new building to replace the current gift shop in the entrance hall.

To prevent a decline in tourists to Kure during the museum’s closure, the municipal government, which owns the museum, has opened temporary exhibits in the city. Among the replacement establishments is a tourist facility called Hohaikan, about 1.8 kilometers away from the museum, where a 1:50 scale model of Yamato’s main gun turret and other exhibits are on display. View Port Kure, a convention and accommodation center near JR Kure Station, houses the Yamato Museum Satellite, where visitors can see a full-scale model of a spotter aircraft, measuring 9.5 meters in length, 11 meters in width and 4 meters in height. Yamato also carried Zero fighter planes, which were developed to identify the impact locations of shells fired from battleships.