Tokyo National Museum Review

Sergei's review

Oldest and largest in Japan

From Japan: Day 3 in Tokyo, Japan on Feb 07 '06

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This is a Japanese analogue of British Museum or Louvre. Just like its British and French cousins, it is clearly a must-visit destination for tourists.

I visited Japanese Gallery and Asian Gallery. That took quite a while, as the museum is very large and interesting. There are several other galleries, including the archaeological one. There are also stand-alone buildings and sculptures of national treasure stature, as well as garden with five teahouses, which regrettably was closed during the winter.

Oldest and largest in Japan

The Japanese Gallery was all what I expected it to be, and then some - thousands of artifacts and educational plaques demonstrating again and again how ancient and rich the Japanese art and culture are – all neatly arranged and lighted. You can devote any time to that museum – from an hour to a week - and get something from any span of time. An hour is enough to run through the rooms and get overwhelmed by the sheer richness of it all. On the other hand, there are artifacts of such complexity and beauty that you can easily spend an hour just looking at one of them from different angles while getting really deeply into what the artist wanted to convey. It was a delight. Very highly recommend!

The Asian Gallery, on the other hand, was a bit of disappointment. The only country that was represented in richness comparable to, say, Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, was China. From that gallery alone, you wouldn’t even get impression that Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand ever produced significant art. Maybe it has something to do with what I perceived as the slight tendency of Japanese to treat some other cultures as barbarian that I noticed on other occasions, or maybe it was just a seasonal quirk; in any case, this was one gallery I could have safely skipped – I saw far superior Asian Art galleries earlier in San Francisco and later in Seoul.