The Little Prince Museum, Hakone

The Little Prince Museum
Hakone, Japan
Originally posted on my Jimdo webpage

More photos and information at The Afterimage

Hakone, Japan, is the last place you would expect to find a museum dedicated to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), but Japan can be surprising. A quaint place, where the adorable, French-inspired buildings stand, quiet and unassuming, and that's the beauty of it.

The streets in the museum are reproductions of Lyon and Paris in the 1900s and the beautiful gardens were maintained in the Provence style. The window displays in almost every shop window were different, themed and impeccably crafted. We couldn't take photos inside the exhibition, but the exhibition featured information about the author's life and the path to creating Le Petit Prince.

We went on an 'off' day so the museum was pretty much deserted. It was incredibly peaceful to wander around and just soak up the ambiance of the place.

The souvenir shop had all manner of Le Petit Prince merchandise, from different versions of the book to mugs and pins and soft toys. Unfortunately, I was pretty much running out of money by that point (Japan 2010: a long story involving unlucky immune systems and personal expenses fail) so I didn't end up buying anything.

Since we're practising succinct web writing with this exercise, I'm not going to overload on photos or text. Did you get to the end of this post? Did you read the entire thing? Are you asleep on your keyboard? A more detailed post will shortly be available on my personal blog, the afterimage - look out for it~