Our Story
City Baker House was founded in 2020 by a small team of art historians, cultural journalists and Japan enthusiasts who were frustrated that Japan's extraordinary museum ecosystem — one of the finest in the world — was still largely inaccessible to international visitors.
The national museums and their collections are magnificent, but finding them, understanding their opening times, deciphering their admission systems, and knowing which exhibitions were on required navigating dozens of separate Japanese-language websites. We decided to fix that.
Starting with just 50 museums in Tokyo and Kyoto, City Baker House has grown to cover over 500 institutions across all 47 prefectures. Our team of writers, researchers and photographers has visited every listed institution, writing original descriptions and capturing original photography.
In 2024 we partnered with the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage to provide direct access to their open-access image databases, making us the world's most comprehensive English-language portal to Japan's museum collections.
