Salt Made in Fukuoka

Salt is essential to all human beings. Needless to say, it plays a very important role in making our food tastier. Nowadays, we can produce salt without much difficulty so we are usually not aware of its importance.  In recent years, excessive salt intake has even been avoided for it can trigger serious diseases like high blood pressure.

Japan, a country with scarce resources had been unable to get salt from rocks or lakes. 
As a result, our ancestors made tremendous efforts in getting salt from sea water.
Some artifacts found in ruins suggest that in Fukuoka, salt production started in the Tumulus period. An article in the famous Manyo-shu, a collection of Japanese poems from ancient times, indicates that the method called moshioyaki was presumably used to extract salt in around Shikano Island. Traces of salt production that were found in the ruins in Umino Nakamichi back this theory.

This exhibition explores the Fukouka people’s way of dealing with salt by showing many artifacts that were found in the ruins and from our own museum collection of history and folklore.

How was salt produced, transported, sold, bought and tasted in Fukuoka? Let’s find out!