How Noritsugu Oda found himself sitting on 1,400 chairs

Inside a house surrounded by birch and larch, in the town of Higashikagura on Japan’s Hokkaido island, is a collection of chairs by Hans J Wegner, Finn Juhl, Børge Mogensen, Bruno Mathsson and more, arranged as if displayed in a museum. 

They are owned by Noritsugu Oda, a chair collector-turned-researcher who, over more than half a century, has amassed 1,400 designs of historical importance from Scandinavia, Italy, Germany, France, the US and Japan. His pastime is a compulsion that has…