Video: Japan Camera Hunter tours Nikon’s incredible Tokyo museum

Belamy Hunt, better known as Japan Camera Hunter, ventured to the Nikon Museum in Tokyo earlier this year and recorded the experience. It looks like a wonderful museum and a must-see for any photographer visiting Tokyo.

The Nikon Museum is a showcase of Nikon’s history, its products and the technology of the company’s various businesses. The museum includes a pair of theaters, a special display about Nikon’s first century, a lens laboratory, an imaging section and much more.

The imaging section is of particular interest to photographers. It includes more than 500 items on display, ranging from the Nikon Model I to modern-era digital SLR cameras and interchangeable lenses. In the video tour above, you can also see Nikon’s underwater cameras, rare lenses, like some of Nikon’s super-rare fisheye lenses, and much more. Shortly into the tour, you can also see an old Canon rangefinder camera that came equipped with a Nikon lens, as Canon’s manufacturing constraints at the time required the two companies to work together on various products.

The ‘Imaging’ section of the Nikon Museum includes more than 500 different cameras and lenses from Nikon’s past. Image credit: Nikon

Nikon has a rich history of developing technologies for space observation, which is showcased in a ‘Space’ section of the museum. A new special exhibition, ‘Astronomical Telescopes, Our Guides to the Beauty of Stars’ started earlier this month, after Japan Camera Hunter visited the museum. The exhibit, which runs until July 21, showcases some of Nikon’s telescope models. You can learn more about Nikon’s smaller consumer-oriented telescopes and the company’s large telescopes installed in observatories around the world. As part of the new special exhibit, visitors can see Nikon’s first telescope released in 1920.

Nikon has a rich history with space observation and photography, as is seen in the ‘Space’ section of the Nikon Museum. An ongoing special exhibit also showcases the company’s history of making telescopes. Image credit: Nikon

In the lens laboratory, Nikon’s optical technologies are on display. Here, visitors can explore Nikon’s anti-reflective coatings and the designs Nikon incorporates into its lenses to reduce various optical aberrations. The museum also includes a 51″ (130cm) long silica glass ingot, as seen at about the one-minute mark in the video above.

The Nikon Museum opened in July 2017 to commemorate Nikon’s 100th anniversary. The museum is located at Nikon’s headquarters in Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan, and is the first museum of its type in Japan.