Nishinomiya Shell Museum, Zoological museum in Nishinomiya-hama, Japan

The Nishinomiya Shell Museum is a building shaped like a yacht sail that holds about 5000 shell specimens from roughly 2000 different species. The collection displays the wide range of shapes and colors found in shells across the world's oceans.

The museum opened on 7 May 1999 in Nishinomiya-hama as a municipal institution devoted to molluscs, run directly by the city rather than through a designated manager. Its holdings grew beyond the display specimens when the Kikuchi Shell Museum donated Noritami Kuroda's shell collection of about 3,800 species and 40,000 specimens. The building was designed by Tadao Ando.

The museum's name in Japanese, Nishinomiya Shirui-kan, is simply "Nishinomiya City Shell Museum". Its collection grew through a donation from the Kikuchi Shell Museum: about 3,800 species and 40,000 specimens assembled by the conchologist Tokubei Kuroda. Visitors can pick up and handle real shells, and each entrant is given a single shell as a gift.

The museum is open from 10:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:30, and closes on Wednesdays (or the following day if Wednesday is a public holiday); it stays open during the summer holiday period. Each visitor receives one seashell as a gift. From Hanshin or JR Nishinomiya Station, take a Hanshin bus to Marinapark-minami and get off right at the stop.

In the courtyard sits the actual Mermaid IV vessel, a real boat once used by an explorer to cross the ocean. Visitors can see this genuine ship and get a sense of what ocean voyages truly involve.