Inside the world's first coronavirus museum exhibition, featuring takeout menus and leaflets of canceled events to commemorate life during the pandemic

• A museum exhibition commemorating the coronavirus pandemic has opened in Japan.
• The Historical Museum of Urahoro, in Hokkaido, has collected around 200 items from local communities since February.
• Among the items are documents showing children how to prepare for online teaching, instructions for making a homemade face mask, a pile of takeout menus, and advice for attending a funeral.
• Both the Museum of London and the The New York Historical Society have also been collecting for their own exhibitions.

The coronavirus pandemic is by no means over, but the first exhibition commemorating the crisis has opened in rural Japan.

The Historical Museum of Urahoro, a small town in Hokkaido, has amassed a small collection of items that reflect what life was like for people in the region during the pandemic.

Among the catalog are documents showing children how to prepare for online teaching, instructions for making a homemade face mask, takeout menus, facemasks, advice for attending a funeral, and a leaflet from a religious shrine announcing the cancellation of a summer festival, according to the Associated Press (AP).

"I am fascinated by how things connect with people," Makoto Mochida, the curator, told the AP. "Things furnish an excellent way to accurately archive history."

Mochida started the collection because he doesn't want the coronavirus to leave the same footprint as the Spanish flu.

The Spanish flu hit Japan in 1918, but very little evidence remains of what life was like then, he said.

Japan has recorded more than 58,000 cases, but deaths have remained relatively low at just over 1,100, according to Worldometer. Urahoro has not recorded a single case so far, but is concerned about outsiders visiting and bringing infections, the AP reported.

Mochida first put out a call for curios in February, according to the Japan Times. Around 200 items have been collected so far.

A larger exhibition is planned for February 2021, the AP said.

A number of other museums — far larger in size — have begun collecting items that represent life during the pandemic.

In April, the New-York Historical Society began its own collection of items that it hopes will inform and educate future generations.

"This is a history that everyone will be looking back on," the museum's director, Margi Hofer, told The Guardian at the time. "We hope people will be able to learn from it and be better prepared in an event like this in the future. To be better prepared to cope, as well."

"We started collecting mid-March," Hofer said. "We were already alert to what items might be potential for collecting – hand sanitizer, masks, gloves – now evolved to a bigger story than we've imagined."

The Museum of London also launched its "collecting COVID" project in April.

The museum wants "to collect both objects and first-hand experiences to reflect Londoners' lives during this time, in order to keep a record and to ensure future generations of Londoners will be able to learn about and understand this extraordinary period."

As of Friday, at least 797,000 people around the world have died from COVID-19, with close to 23 million total confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins University's tracker.