Most of the kids are collectomania
As I think I’ve learned the figure somewhere, 70% of kids under 6 years old are collectomania. At the age of around 10, I was devoted to collecting stickers that came with chocolate cookies. The stickers were very popular among boys at that time. One day, I found a girl in a car running next to my mother’s car, and showed her the best one from my sticker collection through the car windows. My mother, seeing me, said “Stop it. It’s embarrassing.” I still don’t know why my mother felt embarrassed, but I clearly remember that was the moment I quitted collecting the stickers. Soon after that, I made big money for a kid by selling all the rare stickers to my classmates, by the way. Sorry, the introduction has become a quite long. Today’s topic is collection.
Valentino Zagatti Collection: The world’s largest whisky collection
If you are a whisky lover, you may know his name. Valentino Zagatti, he was the world’s famous collector of whisky. His collection collected all over the world for half a century amounted to more than 3000 bottles. What makes his story more remarkable is he was fully blind at the age of 11, long before starting the collection. He had neither seen nor displayed his collection, which was completely different from the boy having shown off the sticker collection to try to get the attention of a girl. Now, I feel I can understand why my mother was pissed off. Anyway, what do you think motivated him? I feel we can improve our understanding about human mentality to collect things by studying his thought.
Oda Collection: The world’s largest chair collection
As I wrote before, our home town is the mecca of wooden furniture, where we have the world’s famous chair collector, Noritsugu Oda. The number of chairs in Oda Collection amounts to about 1350, including most of the world masterpiece chairs, of course! I’m sure it’s worth visiting here only for the collection. You can see a part of them online on this page, but I highly recommend you to come and see the great collection in person here in Asahikawa.
Photo Credit: https://odacollection.jp/
Shungo Ijima
He is travelling around the world. His passion is to explain Japan to the world, from the unique viewpoint accumulated through his career: overseas posting, MBA holder, former official of the Ministry of Finance.