Image: Kobe City Museum
Kobe City Museum is hosting an exhibition devoted to Philipp Franz von Siebold, the German physician and naturalist who came to Japan as a doctor at the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki. According to the museum’s announcement, the show marks the 200th anniversary of Siebold’s travels between Nagasaki and Edo, when he collected and studied materials relating to Japanese culture and nature.
The exhibition places Siebold’s work at the center of a historical exchange between Japan and Europe. While in Japan, he gathered information and specimens that later helped shape outside understanding of the country’s people, landscapes and natural history. The museum describes the project as a celebration of his contribution and of the significance of his research in Japan.
Siebold is a familiar figure in the history of Japanese studies, and the exhibition at Kobe City Museum focuses on the period when he moved between Nagasaki and Edo. That journey, undertaken two centuries ago, forms the basis of the museum’s framing of the exhibition, which emphasizes the collecting and studying of materials connected to Japanese culture and nature.
Kobe City Museum, a public museum in Kobe, has not provided further curatorial details in the material supplied, but the exhibition is presented as a focused institutional project around Siebold’s legacy. The announcement does not indicate additional venues or partner institutions.
The exhibition runs at Kobe City Museum in Kobe, Japan, from July 15 to September 15, 2026.
