Photo/Illutration Chichibu Chinsekikan (Hall of Curious Rocks) is home to more than 900 stones, carved by nature, that resemble human faces. The rocks were collected over 50 years by museum founder Shozo Hayama. The museum is located about two hours northwest of Tokyo. (Photo by Lisa Vogt)

Is it just me? I often see human faces in things. Take, for example, automobiles viewed from the front. The headlights look like eyes, the grille a mouth and the bumper a chin.

Older cars, in my opinion, often have a more friendly “expression” with their cute round lights and small bumpers compared with so many recent models sporting unnecessarily huge kuchisake onna-looking front grilles and angry-looking slit headlights.

I see dragons in the clouds when I gaze up at the sky. I once pulled out carrots in my garden that looked like sexy intertwined legs. And I confess there are a few buildings that I regularly wave at and say hello to whenever I pass by because they look to be living creatures.

So, no sooner had I heard about Chinsekikan--a small museum in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture, that houses stones resembling human faces--than I was at the doorstep early the next morning, looking at a handwritten sign informing visitors to call a cellphone number after 10 a.m. to be let inside.

The two-story museum houses a septarian nodule that can only be described as a large turtle shell, several miniature rock formations that look like mountain ranges with waterfalls, and perhaps more than a thousand stones that, by golly, heat up the wiring in our brains.

Suddenly, pareidolia kicks in and we can see Jesus, Jaws, E.T., Darth Vader, JFK, Donald Trump, Shanshan the panda, a mame-shiba inu, and so much more.

The collection was started by Shoji Hayama, a man born in the Taisho Era (1912-1926) who started accumulating stones in his later years. He opened the museum at the beginning of the Heisei Era (1989-2019) and ran it until his death at age 89 in 2010. Today, it is looked after by his daughter and her husband.

Reading the names given to the stones, I imagined the ones he came up with and those given by younger, more recent visitors. Anyone can name the stones with whatever strikes their fancy, and many rocks have multiple names. A few visitors from overseas sent unique stones as gifts to the museum after returning home, and those are on display, too.

The quirky museum was warm and welcoming, and I stayed longer than I thought I would. I thanked and bid the curator and stony faces farewell and stepped outside. The cars, clouds and buildings were all smiling at me. I nodded and smiled back.

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This article by Lisa Vogt, a Washington-born and Tokyo-based photographer, originally appeared in the July 14 issue of Asahi Weekly. It is part of the series “Lisa’s Things, Places and Events,” which depicts various parts of the country through the perspective of the author, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University.

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