Skip to content
Cinnamon Land
🎲
Nasu Teddy Bear Museum
🏛️ Museum

Nasu Teddy Bear Museum

📍 Tochigi, Nasu

A cozy English-cottage museum in the Nasu highlands stuffed with antique and artist teddy bears from around the world — plus a beloved life-size Totoro-and-Catbus room that delights every visitor.

The Nasu highlands are dotted with small, eccentric museums, and few are as purely sweet as the Nasu Teddy Bear Museum, an English-cottage building filled, floor to ceiling, with teddy bears.

Why It’s Interesting

Inside are antique bears worth small fortunes, whimsical artist-made bears, and elaborate dioramas of bears doing very human things. The surprise hit, though, is a room featuring a life-size Totoro and the Catbus from the Studio Ghibli film — a photo spot that turns adults back into delighted children. It’s small, warm, and unironically charming.

Best Time to Visit

Year-round — fully indoor, a perfect rainy-day or scorching-afternoon refuge while exploring Nasu.

Getting There

It sits among the highland resorts above Nasushiobara Station, easiest reached by car as one stop on a museum-hopping Nasu afternoon.

🐿️ Cinnamon was here

Field report

The Nasu Teddy Bear Museum is a cozy English-cottage affair stuffed with antique and artist bears — and then, upstairs, without warning, a life-size Totoro room, complete with a Catbus big enough for children to climb into, whiskers and all.

I walked in as a professional (mammal, fur, museum credentials) and left as a fan. The antique bears have the dignity of old soldiers — glass eyes, mended paws, a century of being loved to pieces and repaired. Then the Totoro floor detonates all that composure. Children queue for the Catbus. I queued too. The attendant pretended not to see me board. Nasu staff remain the best in Japan.

Small, sweet, an hour at most — perfect rainy-day Nasu. The gift shop is a financial hazard for the soft-hearted. I am soft-hearted.

— Cinnamon 🐿️

📸 Cinnamon's camera roll

Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.

Ten minutes watching an antique bear fish and catch nothing. Glass eyes, mended paws, a century of being loved to pieces and repaired.
Queuing for the Catbus with the children (the attendant pretended not to see us board). Mon-chan surveyed a room of bears fluffier than him and needed to sit down. "…I don't like them."
A cozy museum room full of vintage teddy bears arranged on display
A whole museum of teddy bears. My kind of soft, silly, happy place.
Mon-chan glaring at big teddy bears while Cinnamon the squirrel waves at them
Bigger than me. Fuzzier than me. Plotting to be leader, obviously. I don't like them. 🧸
🏛️ Museum 🏷️ Teddy Bears 🧒 Kids 🏠 Indoor 🌧️ Rainy Day 🏷️ Family Friendly 🏷️ Cute

Where it is

You might also like

Nasu Trick Art Museum
🎨 Art

Nasu Trick Art Museum

A highland gallery of mind-bending optical illusions where the paintings reach out and grab you — pose to be eaten by a shark, hang off a cliff, or shake hands with the Mona Lisa, camera ready.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour
Fujishiro Seiji Museum
🎨 Art

Fujishiro Seiji Museum

A theater-like museum devoted to Seiji Fujishiro's luminous 'kage-e' shadow art — jewel-colored cut-paper fairytale worlds — reached through a garden where a cat sculpture quietly shows you the way.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour
Nasu Stained Glass Museum
🏛️ Museum

Nasu Stained Glass Museum

A museum built like an English manor house, its little stone chapels glowing with antique stained glass from the 1800s — wander between the windows as live pipe-organ and music-box notes drift through.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour
Nasu Safari Park
🦊 Animals

Nasu Safari Park

Drive your own car through a free-range park of around 70 species — lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos — feeding them from the window, and come back after dark for a thrilling night safari among rare white lions.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Nearby discoveries

Nasu Animal Kingdom
🦊 Animals

Nasu Animal Kingdom

A sprawling highland zoo where you can hand-feed capybaras, walk among free-roaming birds and alpacas, watch a thrilling raptor flight show — and, in winter, see capybaras soak in their own steaming hot bath.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day · 4.3 km away
Nasu Highland Park
✨ Experience

Nasu Highland Park

A forest amusement park near the foot of Mt. Nasu with ten roller coasters and dozens of rides among the trees — from a wooden-style woodie to a spinning 'Camelback' — plus zip lines and an adventure forest.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ Full day · 5.0 km away
N's YARD — Yoshitomo Nara's Museum
🎨 Art

N's YARD — Yoshitomo Nara's Museum

The artist Yoshitomo Nara's own private museum, tucked in the Nasu woods: five intimate rooms of his big-headed, big-eyed paintings, his record and toy collections, and a quiet garden café.

📍 Tochigi, Nasushiobara 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day · 6.7 km away
Nasu Flower World
🌲 Nature

Nasu Flower World

A hillside of striped flower terraces high on the Nasu plateau — tulips, poppies, salvia and broom turning the slopes into bands of color, all rolling up toward the bare volcanic cone of Mt. Nasu behind.

📍 Tochigi, Nasu 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour · 7.9 km away
🌸 Spring 🌻 Summer 🍁 Autumn

Comments

  • No comments yet — be the first to share a tip.

Leave a comment

Share a tip, a correction, or what you saw. Comments are reviewed before they appear — no account needed.