Tokyo National Museum
It was a wet and rainy day when we visited the Tokyo National Museum at Ueno Park. I was looking forward to it because official literature bills it as the largest and oldest museum in Japan, with the biggest collection of Japanese art in the world. At the entrance to the museum, we had fun figuring how to open the slot at the umbrella stand to deposit our wet umbrellas. Compared to museums like the Hermitage (St Petersburg) and Prado (Madrid), the Tokyo National Museum was a little underwhelming for a nation so rich in their cultural heritage. There were a wide range of antiques on display: exquisite kimonos, samurai armour, priceless swords, lacquer ware, pottery, scrolls, screens, ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), calligraphy, ceramics, and more. For someone like me who eschews violence, the endless display of swords that look alike was a bit ad nauseum. We only visited the main building, the Japanese Gallery (Honkan) devoted to Japanese art. The rooms were not logically laid out but there were plenty of seats for the visitors to sit back to admire the works on display. There is an excellent museum shop in the basement that sells reproductions from the museum's collections as well as traditional crafts by contemporary artists. The merchandise on sale was of top quality, unlike many other museum shops that sell mostly junk.
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| The Main Gallery, Tokyo National Museum |
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| A national treasure of a grand folding screen with emerald mountains and white sakura |
We were drawn to the Bridgestone Museum of Art because it was reviewed as one of Tokyo's best private art museums, with a small but impressive collection of French Impressionist art, as well as Japanese paintings in the Western style dating from the Meiji Period onward. Always read reviews with a pinch of salt! On the day, the permanent collection includes works by Monet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, and Rousseau, as well as Japanese painters who visited Paris in the 1900s and painted in the western style. True, there was variety but lacking in depth. The latter was not to my taste at all. It simply wasn’t worth the trip all the way from the JR Shinjuku station to the JR Tokyo station. These days, most museums have relaxed the rule of flash-less photography, but not this one. The atmosphere was a bit oppressive, but it was broken by a Japanese man who was re-arranging his plastic carrier bags and causing much rustling in a confined space.
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| The Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo |
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| The Kiss by Constantin Brancusi |
The Mori Art Centre Gallery at Roppongi Hills, Tokyo was holding an exhibition of Alfonso Mucha’s art. It drew in a large crowd on the day – mainly young females, a lot of them dressed in the ubiquitous Japanese style of part doll, part girl, part woman. Until I visited this exhibition, I was totally unaware of this Art Nouveau artist from Moravia. His style is distinctive; it runs through his paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, menus and designs for jewelry. His work featured beautiful young women in flowing, vaguely Neoclasscial-looking robes, with miles of blonde luscious hair, and often surrounded by lush flowers that form halos behind their heads. This dreamy, highly romanticized style clearly appeals to the Japanese. There was a long queue in front of each painting, and patience was called for to wait for one’s turn to view a painting in close quarters. Mucha’s masterpiece however, was The Slav Epic, a series of twenty huge paintings depicting the history of the Czech and Slavic people. Only a few were in display and there was hardly any audience at all in front of those sombre canvases.
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| The Mori Art Centre, Tokyo |
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| A poster for the Mucha exhibition Pictured is the artist's daughter Jarslava |
The Japan Ukiyoe Museum at Matsumoto exhibits ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) from the vast collection of the Sakai family. One of Matsumoto's wealthiest merchants of his time, Sakai Yoshiaki started collecting ukiyo-e and other pieces of art roughly 300 years ago. His descendants have been enlarging the collection to over 100,000 pieces, making it one of the world's largest private art collections. It was this that motivated the taxi trip to this otherwise off-the-beaten-track gallery. Compared to the size of the collection and the museum building, the number of works exhibited in the Japan Ukiyoe Museum is small, partly due to the fact that the building was originally built solely for storage rather than exhibition purposes. It was a disappointment to find the prints hung in a rather haphazard way, some of them not even straight, and some of them hung in the corridor leading to the toilet and the drinks machine! There was a special exhibition on the day, featuring ukiyo-e prints that depicted westerners in western clothes. The room was dingy which made it hard to see the details of the prints. There were no English descriptions, suggesting that the museum has no desire to appeal foreign visitors. Upstairs, the sole female museum assistant put on a film about ukiyo-e making, a fascinating film that introduces the visitors to this form of art making.
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| The only redeeming feature of the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, Matsumoto - the spacious seating area with some ghastly plastic peices |
The Kubota Itchiku Museum is a unique museum devoted to kimonos created by Kubota Itchiku, who spent his lifetime reviving the lost art of Tsuigahana silk dying, used to decorate elaborate kimono from the 14th to 16th centuries. The gallery is part of a small complex in the wooded hills along the northern coast of Lake Kawaguchi. There was a Japanese garden with a waterfall at the front, a museum shop at the entrance, and a main gallery that holds the spell bindingly beautiful kimonos depicting themes of nature and the seasons. Also on display are parts of his unfinished masterpiece “Symphony of Light”, kimonos that together form a picture of Mt Fuji. The main gallery boasts a wooden floor which was well polished by visitors who had to remove their shoes at the entrance, not an unusual requirement in Japanese buildings. A group of American visitors arrived as we left, thankfully, since they immediate broke the peace and tranquillity by talking at the top of their voices. The host nation must find this loud talking habit quite irksome since even talking on mobile phones is frowned upon in public transport in Japan.
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| Set in woodlands, the Kobuta Itchiko Museum, Lake Kawaguichi |
The Lake Kawaguchi Art Museum – a modern boxy building of glass and more glass, is dedicated to art focusing on Mt Fuji, from paintings to photography of this most sacred of mountains in Japan. Inside the cavernous hall were lined stunning photographs of Mt Fuji taken across the seasons, and there was a small tearoom serving tea and Japanese cakes. Inside the exhibition rooms, the low lighting gave it a hushed atmosphere which was made eerie by the lack of visitors on the day.
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| A modern Lake Kawaguichi Art Museum. |
The Mitsubishi Minatomirai Museum in Yokohama is a really interesting science museum with interactive exhibits that attract people of all ages. It was exceedingly well executed, and there was something for all ages. There were English translations for all the displays in the various zones: transportation, aerospace, ocean, environment / energy, which made it meaningful for those of us who cannot read Japanese. The two exhibits that most interested me were the aircraft simulator and the helicopter simulator. Boy, it was not easy to handle either of these, especially at descent.
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| From the cockpit of the aircraft simulator at the Mitsubishi science museum, Yokohama |
The Railway Museum as the name suggests, is all about railways in Japan. It traces the history and transitions in train technology and train systems from the start of the Japanese railways in the early Meiji era through to the present. There were over 30 real trains, including the six-car Imperial train that was reverently enclosed behind glass panels. There was a big model railway exhibition and at show times, special lighting was put on which attracted the old and the young. On the top floor, there is a viewing gallery from where train enthusiasts can watch the shinkansens speed by. On the ground floor, there were a number of railway carriages thoughtfully laid down on tracks where visitors can sit down and enjoy the bento boxes purchased from a number of shops within the museum. The Japanese children are wonderfully well behaved - no running around, no screaming, no crying, no whining - what a pleasant bunch!
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| From the first floor, view of the railway cars on display at the Railway Museum outside Tokyo |
