4/30/24: First day in Tokyo: Takeaways from Tokyo's National Museum

4/29: After an 11-hour flight from San Francisco on seats that didn't recline and a 15-hour time change from Denver where we'd started our new adventure a few days earlier, Steven and I were just a tad tired when we landed in Tokyo! Fortunately, it was a snap getting into the city on the express train to a nearby metro station and a cab to our hotel in the Asakusa area. 

We hit a small grocery store near the hotel that first night to pick up some rolls and fruit for breakfast. Our room has a kettle, glory be, but no microwave, hot plate, etc. Perhaps my eyes weren't seeing straight as these carrots looked enormous!

The entrance to a famous shrine was just a 5-minute walk from our hotel - more on it later!

4/30: Steven and I always joke we don't "do" time changes and this was no different. Somehow, our bodies don't need hours to recover from the hours lost or gained in long-distance travel so we were ready to "hit the road running" and start exploring Tokyo right away. First up was a trip to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, one of the city's largest public areas and home to the zoo, multiple museums, and religious buildings. 

I thought for a minute we'd gotten the wrong flight and were in Vancouver after seeing this large totem pole. Nope, it was put up by the Ueno chapter of Lions Club. I had heard of the international service organization for years but hadn't known that LIONS stands for Liberty, Intelligence, Our Nation's Safety and that it has over 1.4 million members in 200 countries and geographic areas around the world.

The statue honored Imperial Prince Akihito, the first president of the Japanese Red Cross Society.

The Japanese are famous for their spring cherry blossoms but we'd arrived about two weeks late for their intoxicating scent. Instead, they were replaced by rhododendrons which were blooming profusely all over Tokyo.

At long last, we arrived at the much-ballyhooed Museum that had been described as not only the city's best museum but possibly the best in the country! That's a pretty lofty expectation to live up to so we went in all agog at what we might see as we're generally big museum buffs. The Tokyo National Museum is comprised of five 'galleries', but that's a misnomer as each one has its own building. The main one is the Honkan which opened in 1938 and specializes in Japanese artwork from ancient times to the 19th century. 

The following are some of the museum's highlights based on our preferences or biases in Asian art.

We've been fortunate to see Japanese art in museums all over the world but not many ancient kimonos so they caught our attention.  This silk crepe 18th-century kimono was festooned with wisterias from the waist up, and fences and clematis from the waist down which was common of kimonos from the middle of the Edo Period which spanned from 1603-1868.

Steven and I can never get enough of admiring Japanese screens so we were drawn to this one. In this work, the artist Morikage painted cranes, swans, and the sport of falconry which was regarded as a traditional symbol by the shoguns and feudal lords of the Edo Period to increase their authority. 

We spent what seemed like ages examining a young woman's kimono after reading that it contained a hidden message of cultural refinement. We found the paintbrush and the board game but gave up looking for a musical instrument and a stack of books, the other items that also represented four cultural pursuits once considered popular in East Asia. I guess we weren't sufficiently culturally refined!

Gotta love these samurai warriors' clothing! The samurai believed they gathered strength from their armor's animal imagery. This armor was decorated with bear fur and bear ears which may have meant it belonged to an esteemed samurai clan.

Monkeys in tomb sculptures are extremely rare. This 6th-century one depicted a mother monkey slightly turning its head as if to check on its baby, now lost.

There was an extensive section of woodblock prints called Ukiyo-e in the museum's main gallery. They were paintings, originally hand-painted by the artist, that depicted people and daily life during the Edo Period. However, the development of ukiyo-e prints enabled the same painting to be printed countless times by using different woodblocks. 

Here's a great explanation of how the prints were made and how museum patrons, including myself, could try their hand at making an ukiyo-e print!

The steps involved in making our own ukiyo-e print:

It was great fun making my own print of this famous work!

Onto the Toyokan Gallery next door for its eclectic collection of non-Japanese Eastern art. Many works were from China and Korea because of their long ties with Japan. This 6th-century Head of a Bodhisattva from the Northern Wei Dynasty was found in a cave in Henan Province, China.

This marble Chinese statue was originally part of a triad - its central figure is at the British Museum in London. Museum staff knew from the inscription on its pedestal both the year and location of the statue's provenance.

The Toyokan collection of Bronze Drums intrigued us as we hadn't seen them before, or at least to the best of my recollection! The playing of bronze drums at important occasions by some ethnic groups in southern China and Southeast Asia dates back as far as 500 BC. Playing the drum varied by region and era but it generally involved hanging the drum around its constricted part so it was played by being hit with drumsticks on the flat face. Though the basic shapes remained constant, their form, motif, and decorations varied over time and area.

A Khmer (Cambodian) triad-style sculpture from the Angkor period:

India was represented in this early 17th-century chintz Drape for Tents with Flowers with the flowers rendered using multiple woodblocks. That was familiar to us after learning about the Japanese version of print-making!

Almost stick figures from Indonesia:

Take a moment to click on the picture to make it bigger so you can see the artistry in this bronze 2nd-century Vietnamese or Chinese Bucket-Shaped Vessel. 

Who doesn't like ancient gold crowns?! Evidently, gold crowns with swinging pendant fittings were intended exclusively for kings in ancient Korea. This came from their 5th-century Three Kingdoms Period.

You have to wonder what made this 5th-century Head of a Buddha smile! It was found in a cave in China's Shanxi Province, a place on our itinerary later this trip.

Standing guard outside the gallery were these sandstone 18th- or 19th-century Officials from Korea.

The Museum's Architecture Gallery was closed when we visited.

En route to the next gallery, we paused at the Black Gate or Kuromon, originally the main gate of the elite Ikeda samurai residence who ruled over an area of western Japan.  Based on the gate's design and construction methods, it was likely built during the last decades of the Edo Period. Beginning in 1892, the gate was moved among royal residences until it was brought to the museum in 1954.

Looking back at the gate from the entrance to the Gallery of Horyu-ji Treasures: 

Its collection comprised of 7th-century masks, metalwork, and sculptures from the damaged Horyu-ji temple in Nara, a Japanese city we'll be visiting soon. Understandably, the gilt and copper Banner for the Kanjo Ceremony was one of the most outstanding Horyu-ji Treasures and was listed among the temple's properties in 747. Atop the square umbrella-shaped canopy hangs one large, central banner, six smaller panels, and four smaller banners made up of three panels - got all that?!  Each panel is decorated with elaborately engraved Buddhist triads and celestial beings.

The gallery's biggest collection was of 48 gilt Buddha statues, each only 30-40cm tall.

The statues were indeed fabulous but it was too overwhelming to really appreciate each one when there was a sea of them in one room.

Our takeaway from having viewed each of the galleries at Tokyo's National Museum wasn't as positive and glowing as we'd expected, especially since we'd chosen it as our initial experience in Tokyo. Was it because we have become jaded by previously seeing so much Asian art, the uninspiring (to us) buildings housing the works of art, the dreary weather, or were we in fact too tired to do the museum justice? Perhaps a combination of all the factors is the answer.

Posted on May 2nd, 2024, from our second-to-last day in Japan's capital city. We've come to admire so much in our few days here - the kindness of the Japanese people, the absence of any dirt, trash, or graffiti anywhere even though garbage cans are as rare as a two-dollar bill in the US, the absolute efficiency of, and ease of using, the mass transit system, the almost total absence of visible security and guards in the museums and public places we've toured, the lack of any begging or petty crime, the absence of visible homelessness, and the feeling of safety even in one of the world's largest cities. To tourists like us spending almost a month in the country, those are heartwarming factors that make us happy to be here and look forward to learning whether our initial impressions will be borne out as we move on to see far more of Japan.

Next post: Toshugu Shrine and its Peony Garden at Ueno Park.