And why do the Japanese so love to look stones in the eyes (7 photos)

Do you know what pareidolia is? When we see some figures or images in random features and folds created by nature. A cat was burned onto the burnt pancake - that's everyday pareidolia. And the Japanese (who else) raised it to museum level.





Will we ever be as happy as the Japanese woman looking at stones with eyes?

And they opened a museum of stones on which everyone can see faces (I don’t see all of them, I would throw out some of the exhibits, sorry, Japanese).

1000 very necessary stones

Many children collect a collection of beautiful pebbles in childhood, and Shozo Hayama did not stop collecting even when he grew up. He has been adding to his collection of stones with faces for 50 years.



This is the famous Presley stone. Well, I don’t know, I think it’s Trump...

And when quite a lot of stones with faces had accumulated, the Chinsekikan Museum, or the Hall of Curious Stones, was opened. In total there are more than 1,700 stones, and he considered the pride of his collection to be a cobblestone that looked like Elvis Presley.

The museum is located in the city of Saitama, not far from Tokyo (2 hours drive), and this is a fairly popular destination for domestic tourism. The Japanese generally like to travel within the country rather than abroad - they are more interested in their strange museums than in foreign attractions.





But the pirate stone is funny, he should be given the best place in this museum

Because Shozo understands that the average Japanese is interested in stones with eyes, but foreigners are not.

The first rule of the rock museum

Everyone talk about the stone museum! In fact, never use force on a stone or a chisel to make it look more like a face.



These are the spirits of the forest from Miyazaki, perhaps stones with faces are much deeper in Japanese culture than in ours, that’s why they are interested

The whole trick is that the stones should be pristinely similar to faces, and not polished. This is the whole meditative concept - to show what nature has given to man.

The best part is the stones that don't yet have a name. Everything is clear with the pirate stone or the Elvis stone, but there are stones without names. You can offer them apt names about who they resemble. The kind of game that takes you back to the times when you were also eight years old and played “this cloud looks like.”



I used arrows to mark the stones that I consider not worthy of a place on the shelf. And to put it mildly, in fact I would question half of it

So over time, Mickey Mouse stones, Nemo fish stones, even Dwayne Johnson stones appeared here. The same one as The Rock - how ironic.

Now Shozo has already died, his daughter and widow are looking after his father’s museum. It is not clear whether they collect face stones with the same frenzy, or agree to accept as a gift the “cool stones” found by other boys in their souls.



There behind are children's drawings of the owner of this museum and his widow. The kids like it.

I have ambivalent feelings about this museum. On the one hand, it’s very nice, like a museum of childhood, when you find pebbles with faces and rejoice. On the other hand, two hours of travel for this? I would never spend it.



The widow's favorite stone. Apparently, she really loved her husband and his eccentricities