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Mexico City / DPA
Tiny veteran cars, plastic wrestling figures, trains, rag dolls, a horse carousel slot machine and a giant shark are just some on instantly lovable toys found in a one-of-a-kind Mexican museum.
Located on the same street where its founder, collector Roberto Yukio Shimizu, grew up, the Mexican Antique Toy Museum collects the little playthings that children preserve. His father settled in the Colonia Doctores, a working-class district in Mexico City, nearly 90 years ago and that is where the family stayed. The six-hall museum housing the antique toy collection is a no-frills building. Large toys hang outside on the facade.
The three-storey museum has on show 40,000 pieces, most of them manufactured between 1920 and 1970 and 71-year-old Shimizu has even more toys stored in three warehouses. He began collecting toys at age 10.
“I opened this museum so that my three children commit to taking care of the collection. There comes a time when the collector asks himself what is going to happen, and if I die tomorrow, whether my collection is going to turn into a problem for the family and everything is going to end up in flea markets and garage sales,” Shimizu told dpa in an interview.
Shimizu’s father emigrated to Mexico from Japan in 1928. As the first-born, Shimuzu was familiar with the toys his parents sold as part of the inventory of their stationery shop in Colonia Doctores. Shimuzu was bitten by the collector’s bug early on and began buying toys for himself in street markets and antique shops. Some were re-sold at the family shop. “It was good for our shop and my father always trusted me. He gave me money and I would go shopping (for toys)”, Shimizu said.
Over 60 years Shimuzu’s collection has ballooned. One of the reasons for establishing the museum, set up eight years ago, is the emotional value the collection holds for Shimuzu.
Some showcases are filled with miniatures. Graffiti artists decorated the walls of the roof terrace and the city skyline is the backdrop. In addition to its aesthetic interest, Shimizu says the museum provides an anthropological snapshot of Mexico in the 20th century. He says that Mexico lived through a golden period from 1900 to 1960, despite own revolutionary turmoil from 1910-1917 and two world wars.
“It was a time of learning in philosophic and intellectual terms,” he said. During that stage of its history, because of its population growth, Mexico possessed one of the top 10 toy industries in the world.
Shimizu, an architect by profession, has gathered hundreds of thousands of toys manufactured in those years.
That is why, according to Shimuzu, his museum, “is a historic legacy of Mexico. Not only in the toy field but it is also mirrors the Mexican economy at the time and Mexican society.” Shimuzu feels that the working-class district where his museum is located is the perfect spot for a toy collection to attract visitors.
“The museum cannot be a monument to the architect who designed it with large buildings. Those are museums made for high-society culture. We organize many events for the community here like workshops and concerts. People feel fine in here,” he says. “Some people say that the museum has trinkets and I say that there are trinkets here that are worth more than their car,” said Shimizu.
However, Shimuzu acknowledges that he keeps the museum going only because of the positive feedback left by visitors. If he were to tie its future to income or the number of visitors, he would have closed it long ago. Sometimes the museum is empty of visitors. After seeing the museum, visitors are asked to fill out a sheet of paper with some questions, give a brief opinion and draw the toy that they liked the most. Those notes are the biggest source of satisfaction for Shimuzu and his staff.
“Fantastic. Very exciting and very interesting. It is like an art project,” wrote Sally Timms, from the United States. Jorge Cuenca, another visitor wrote: “The collections are complete. There is no order, but it’s cool.”
One of the upcoming exhibits being planned at the Mexican Antique Toy Museum is a show of between 3,000 and 4,000 German toys made by the Maerklin, Schuco, Fleischmann and Bing toy companies. These antique pieces were manufactured soon after the Second World War.
