There are dinosaurs at the station, dinosaurs on the manhole covers, and a world-class museum buried in a hillside surrounded by rice fields.
You get off the local train and there is a velociraptor on the platform. Not a statue placed tastefully to one side — on the platform, at eye level, staring.
The manhole covers have dinosaurs. The bus has dinosaurs. A bakery has a dinosaur.
Then you get to the museum, which is a silver dome sunk into a hillside, and you go down an escalator into a dark hall with 50 mounted skeletons in it, in a farming town, in one of the least-visited prefectures in Japan.
Fukui Prefecture accounts for the overwhelming majority of dinosaur fossils found in Japan, and the Katsuyama site is the centre of it. Multiple species new to science have been named after the prefecture — Fukuiraptor, Fukuisaurus, Fukuivenator, which is the kind of naming enthusiasm that tells you everything.
The Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum would be a serious attraction in a capital city. It is instead here, and it was substantially expanded in 2023, with skeletons, a working fossil lab you can watch through glass, and displays that are genuinely well-designed rather than merely large.
You can join an actual dig at the excavation site in season. You are given a hammer and a section of rock and, within reason, you keep what you find. Children lose their minds. Adults lose their minds and claim it is for the children.
The bonus, fifteen minutes away, is Heisenji Hakusan Shrine: a moss-covered temple ruin where the forest is slowly repossessing a set of stone steps, and which is almost always empty. If you have seen photographs of a green, silent, mossy Japanese forest floor, it looked like this.
The Hokuriku Shinkansen reached Fukui in 2024, which has made the whole prefecture dramatically easier to reach and has not yet made it crowded.
The interesting thing is not the dinosaurs. It is watching a small rural town in a shrinking prefecture decide what it is — and then commit at every scale, from the international-standard museum down to the manhole covers, with no irony anywhere. Japan has hundreds of towns quietly trying to solve the same problem. Katsuyama is what it looks like when one of them actually pulls it off.
- Species named after the prefecture include Fukuiraptor, Fukuisaurus, Fukuititan and Fukuivenator. The naming committee has not been troubled by restraint.
- The museum reopened after major expansion in 2023 and is one of the three largest dinosaur museums in the world by exhibition space.
- Heisenji Hakusan Shrine was once a temple complex of several thousand buildings, destroyed in 1574. What is left is moss, stone and a lot of quiet.
Getting there
Echizen Railway from Fukui Station to Katsuyama, about 55 minutes, then a bus or taxi to the museum. Fukui is now on the Hokuriku Shinkansen, so Tokyo to Fukui is roughly three hours.