In Mexico City, a father and son try to maintain their treasured, but threatened, toy museum: a labyrinth of lost childhood made up of the toys that have been thrown away.
In 1940, a Japanese couple fleeing Tokyo arrived in Mexico City and opened a stationary shop. One by one they bought the floors above the shop — all six of them — and transformed them into a refuge for migrants and other souls trekking the earth. Today, that building is another sort of refuge: one for any once beloved item that has been overlooked, abandoned, broken or thrown away.
This is the toy universe of Roberto Shimizu, the only child of that Japanese couple. Roberto has collected run-down everyday objects and old playthings — ones that “contain joy” — for over ten decades. Capitalising on a megacity’s waste crisis he takes in around 150 items a day, which are brought to him by a rotation of pepenadores (litter pickers) who present him with things they have salvaged from skips. Roberto cannot do things in the singular. Even his son is a duplicate: almost identical, also called Roberto Shimizu, also an architect who has never built a building, also trapped by the looming shadows of his parents in this palace of the past.
In this chaotic land of excess Roberto Shimizu ‘señor’ is the architect and master. Like Prospero on his tropical island he has constructed an isolated hellish paradise of endless, cyclical days. Deeply fearful of the future, he refuses to hand control over to his son: that would perhaps mean growing up for good.
As Mexico changes fast all around him, the collector becomes more and more panicked about clinging onto what he knows — his past, the one that gifted this child of immigrants a happy childhood. Meanwhile people entering his magical labyrinth get lost in time, latching onto bits of personal history they thought were lost forever, even sometimes becoming angry and believing these items were stolen from them. Roberto, who is there daily, feeds off and survives from his visitor’s memories, whilst continuing to hunt parts of his own.
6AM in Colonia Doctores
Lined up along a bench outside sit a silent row of pepenadores, including Roberto’s favourite: Carlos. Having been up since dawn to pilfer items off the back of rubbish trucks, each carries bags of recently harvested items: luchador dolls, a rocking horse, an antique piggy bank. They wait patiently for their turn to be summoned to enter and present their wares. There is an almost competitive silence between them.
A series of staff, the gatekeepers, turn up to unlock the front door. All of them are locals whose families have lived in the area for generations. For each, this building has become their sanctuary, a church they are devoted to with patient dedication. To save money, lights are only turned on if a visitor happens to turn up. The staff spend their days in darkness, only now and again running across and up floors to illuminate the maze-like underworld one room at a time. Most of the lights don’t work anyway.
7AM in The Museum
Inside, a neatly dressed man, seventy-seven years old, will be waiting in his office. In his usual outfit of his dead father’s clothes — waistcoat, checked shirt, pressed trousers — he is the physical embodiment of this nostalgic universe. This is Roberto Shimizu: the collector and creator of The Toy Museum. Above and around him are suspended levels filled floor to ceiling with everyday items collected over ten decades, around seven million of them: a small portion of his collection. For Roberto, the child of foreigners to this place, toys were tools to help process the surreal new world he was brought up in. Growing up with children who made playthings from rubbish found on the streets, Roberto began to safeguard items that contained ‘moments of joy’. Preferring those that had been discarded or abandoned, he began hiding things from his parent’s stationary shop, first outgrowing a drawer, then a cupboard, then his bedroom, until he started moving things into a storeroom. This huge, shadowy monster of a place — filled with vitrines of miniature scenes Roberto has constructed from flea-market scrap, and displaying only around 5% of his collection in total — feels like of physically entering someone’s memory palace. One that is haunted by something still living through him, or that he is yet to find the answer to.
12PM on the Rooftop
Around midday, someone else will turn up, looking like he’s just woken up. This man is an almost identical but younger incarnation of Roberto. Forty years old and also called Roberto Shimizu, he is the collector’s son — and he will also dressed in his grandfather’s clothes. Having suffered from depression for about twenty years, Roberto Joven (I’ll call the father “señor” and son “joven” to distinguish them) has unfailing optimism but struggles to manage the museum. He turns up energised and cheery but spends hours floundering under criticism from his father, who openly states he has no faith in his son’s abilities to carry the museum into the future. Having struggled with being “half Japanese, half Mexican” all his life, Roberto found solace in the Japanese term of being Hāfu:“double”. A passionate cartoon muralist, he spends most of his time painting, and has transformed the upper floors into a colourful, adolescent feeling urban playground. In the open sky, these spaces are a visible escape from his father’s dominion. The shadow of legacy looms large for both men. Neither can grow up in this place where the past is reinforced daily.
4PM in The Museum
Every other week, a group of Alzheimer’s patients are taken round the museum for “memory therapy”. With confusion they take a while to adjust to this manic labyrinth, then, little by little, and only at certain moments, have parts of their minds lit up by its sights. The people they once were come shining through again. They return often to childhood, before the age of ten, with perfect clarity. Some become angry at the sight of the toys behind bars and glass, believing they are objects that were stolen or thrown away by their parents. Many become emotional and cry for the loss of something or someone that they cannot quite place. Upon leaving again, the memories have dissipated. But the toys remain put, waiting patiently in preparation for the next visit, when they will be able serve their purpose once more.
TSUKUMOGAMI
In Japanese folklore, tsukumogami are household objects that, once they have served their owner/s for a hundred years, receive a soul and come alive. They are usually harmless, though they tend to play pranks. They also have the capacity to become angry and can group together to take revenge against those who threw them away, misused or overlooked them. To prevent this, jinja ceremonies are performed to console broken or unusable objects.
Industrial, socialistic, defiantly disorganised, the museum mirrors the area around it. Colonia Doctores is infamous for the trade of stolen cars, but has a deep-felt loyalty amongst those dealt a low card in the lottery of life. Following a philosophy to reform the rejected into the admired, Roberto sustains the spirit of Doctores by making Toy Sculptures from trash using a method he has invented called “TARO” (Thrown Away Recovered Objects). His works are large-scale, visionary, bizarre. An extraordinarily imaginative but also intensely controlled person, Roberto has given himself the Becketian task of cataloguing every item he acquires by hand. A magical kingdom of junk, an homage to the overlooked, an altar to eternal childhood, Roberto’s philosophies have navigated his curation. He only collects unusual or rejected objects, what he terms“Arte Feo” (Ugly Art), and stubbornly stopped collecting new toys when Star Wars introduced factory-made franchise collectibles in 1970.
It was my Scottish father who first found out about the museum in an outdated guidebook. When I moved to Mexico City I asked locals about it, but they’d never heard of the place and said foreigners shouldn’t go to Doctores. With lots of time on my hands, I went.
During the pandemic I worked as an archivist from my childhood home and in many ways everything felt like it was going backwards in time. I met Roberto Joven on my first trip to museum and he asked me to help catalogue the collection. The millions of miniatures made the idea overwhelming: it was clearly unachievable. But I went every week and took pictures of toys in a storeroom, cataloguing pieces of junk one by one as they accumulated by the hour.
The whole thing felt pointless and endless, and that interested me. Archiving, in a way, is pointless and endless: objects that need to be protected from anything ‘alive’ — pests, dust, a human touch — in order to survive must eventually be labelled ‘dead’, but are in fact our only representatives of life. Or, as Francis Bacon much more brilliantly put it, “Dust seems eternal… the one thing that lasts forever. After all, we all return to dust”.
Roberto believes he has a treasure trove of Mexican history in his hands. The government, who cut all his funding in 2018, clearly doesn't agree. Even children, whose opinions Roberto cherishes above all others, are beginning not to connect with the unrecognisable toys they see on display. After a lifetime of work Roberto’s collection may be rendered a mountain of junk. This to me, is terrifying and perfect. It represents a lot of what I think we are fearful of. What if we won’t be remembered? What if our efforts result in nothing? What if that’s the way it always is? In archives, I saw the minutiae of past stranger’s lives — events that were so important to them at the time — become meaningless in today’s world. How can we ever asses what will become relevant in the future?
For me, Roberto’s fight for and celebration of the banal is beautiful. Like the refuge this place once was for migrants, it has been a sanctuary for transitory souls, perhaps particularly for those who struggle with the idea of growing up, as perhaps I do or once did. This is a place where one man’s singular vision has transformed the normal into the exceptional. I can’t think of a better legacy to leave behind.
Gracias, Thank you, ありがとう