Ikigai

Patricia and Guillermo carried out an unthinkable epic for a cultural purpose: to move a house from the mountains of Japan to Argentina to make a museum. An odissey that took more than 25 years.

In Boulogne, Buenos Aires, a 200-plus-year-old Japanese Minka (民家; literally translated as “house of the people”) stands as the oldest dwelling in Argentina. La Casa de Japón, a residence which also functions as a museum, contains one of the largest historical Japanese craft collections outside Japan. The Minka itself was dismantled and transported 20,000 km from the mountains of Fukui in Japan, via Nagoya, to Buenos Aires in the 1980s. More than two decades later, after years of careful planning, research and restoration, the museum opened its doors to the public in 2006.