Abstract
Museums are not currently sufficiently used for peace and environmental education, except for visits to large-scale museums by students on school trips. Many smaller private museums have important exhibits for such education, but have almost no visits from schools. Therefore, we held interviews with four private museums at which important exhibits related to peace and environmental education are shown. Based on the results, we analyzed each museum with regard to exhibition contents, traffic accessibility, relationship with local residents, and operational issues in order to determine the reasons for the number of visits from schools. To encourage greater use of such private museums by schools, we focused on their approaches to discussion of past wars and environmental destruction, and on original activities, such as essay contests and use of volunteer assistance.
