Minakata Kumagusu Museum

This museum in Shirahama documents the life of Wakayama-born naturalist Minakata Kumagusu, one of Japan's most unconventional scholars. Despite dropping out of school, he mastered botany, folklore, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, spending years at the British Museum and befriending European scientists as well as Sun Yat-sen. Back in Japan, he cataloged new species of slime mold in the forests of Kumano and campaigned against the Meiji government's shrine consolidation policy, correctly arguing that closing shrines would destroy the forests surrounding them. His career reached an unusual peak when Emperor Hirohito, a keen biologist, summoned him to give a personal lecture on slime molds.