There are five in the frame, all in kimono. In what appears to be a tea room—tatami floors, sliding doors—a young girl kneels to pour tea for her parents. Her father takes a long pull from his pipe, releasing a small cloud into the air. Her mother balances the teacup while holding a sleepy baby. The father reaches for food from the girl's plate, and the forty-second film ends.

This is the second film ever made in Japan, shot in a dye shop in 1897 in Nishijin, and marked the first time a video camera entered a Japanese home. Two streets from where that scene once unfolded, another domestic room now houses the machines that kept such moments alive. Once part of the city's textile-dyeing industry, it is now Japan's only institution devoted to the history of toy films and small-gauge cinema.

Run by Yoneo and Fumiyo Ota, the museum has recently relocated to this location. Following the ending of their ten-year lease, the couple received crowdfunded money to help them continue the museum in Nishijin. The machiya offers over twice the space the last property did, yet it still has a residue of the domestic: deep eaves, a slit of light down the tori-niwa, step-softening tatami. Glass cases and cubed shelving rise where pantry goods would have typically stacked; a dining table becomes an impromptu seminar desk. You enter by pulling back a yellow noren and end up in living rooms that double as archives and theatres.

This is not the first time the Otas have restaged a home. The previous building in Mibu—a weaver's-style machiya that once served as a Kyō-yūzen dye workshop—was itself a palimpsest. When the Otas opened there in 2015, the house leaned a full fifteen centimeters; friends from film sets and a friendly carpenter helped brace beams, lay floors, and conjure a screening hall from a factory's bones. Nishijin changes the scale of the gesture. Where Mibu demanded shoring up a fragile survivor, this sturdier machiya lets the collection breathe: rows of cameras and toy projectors now sit in generous grids; a hall upstairs turns over for talks and screenings of antique Japanese films.

Fumiyo calls the collection garakuta—junk. Her husband disagrees. Each reel represents something saved from the scrap heap: condensed films sold in department stores, amateur home movies, odd-gauge formats too expensive for national archives to bother with.

Yoneo began collecting in the 1980s while working as a professor at Osaka University of Arts, using research funds to assemble and restore toy films from across Japan. Toy films were the hand-cranked, home-viewing afterlives of theatrical prints—condensed scenes sold in department stores and watched on tin projectors at kitchen tables. Their very survival is a byproduct of repurposing: fragments trimmed from longer works, saved because they could be used again and again. The museum leans into these minor modes—9.5mm Pathé-Baby strips, 8mm and 16mm home movies, odd gauges that don't fit neatly into national archives are spotlit here. 

His oldest piece is a recording of Emperor Meiji's funeral from 1913, shot on 17.5mm film—half the width of standard stock, a format so obscure that major institutions wouldn't waste storage space on it. Yoneo bought recordings and other items on eBay when the yen was strong. Now the currency is weak, and the sellers have mostly disappeared.

"Since everything went digital," he says, "companies started throwing away their analog equipment. Instead of the trash, they gave it to me." He gestures toward shelves lined with tin projectors, hand-cranked viewers, and ancient cameras.

The Otas have kept the museum independent and nimble, sustained by Yoneo's pension and crowdfunded money. Films that require expensive restoration are passed on to Japan's National Film Archive; reels they can't afford to buy are borrowed from antique shops. Japan doesn't fund private museums. Their operation exists in the spaces between policy and personal obsession.

You are guided through the museum. You sit at a family-sized table with the curators themselves while the projector warms or a DVD is burned through an ancient PC. The curatorial voice is conversational. Yoneo threads a reel, and for forty seconds the house is somewhere else—a 1910s funeral procession, a street scene, a samurai gag—before the lights rise and you are back in this borrowed parlor with its shelves of lenses and hand-hung screens.

Fumiyo's vision extends beyond these walls. She dreams of transforming an abandoned high school in central Kyoto into a proper film and culture museum—a space large enough to serve the public with government support and institutional backing. "Last March, a high school for art moved to the front of Kyoto station," she explains. "Now that old high school is empty." The building waits while she navigates bureaucracy that seems indifferent to her proposal.

What the Otas have built is fragile. "Three to five years is the limit because we are old," Fumiyo admits frankly. When they stop, the collection will scatter, but more importantly, their method will disappear - the intimate touring, hands-on demonstrations, the seamless blend of archive and homeliness.

The Otas have spent decades converting domestic spaces into cultural repositories, filling gaps that institutions ignore through sheer obsessive devotion. In a city famous for preserving temples and palaces, the Toy Film Museum operates in the margins, quietly maintaining small histories inside everyday architecture. One day, this house will simply be a house again. And somewhere, perhaps in another converted room, another fragment of domestic life will play out—another set of walls will briefly hold the past.