Tokyo National Museum (©JNTO)
National Science Museum (©JNTO)
National Museum of Western Art (©JNTO)
| Tokyo's Ueno Park contains five major museums: the Tokyo
National Museum, the National
Museum of Western Art, the National
Science Museum, the Tokyo
Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Ueno
Royal Museum (site is Japanese only). The most prominent of these is the Tokyo
National Museum, Japan's largest museum, with a collection of about 90,000
pieces that focuses on Japan but includes both Eastern and Western artworks and
ancient relics. The museum's Main Building showcases about 42,000 Japanese artworks
and handcrafted objects, including pottery, textiles, paintings, and armor and
weaponry. Toyokan (Orient Building) boasts an extensive collection of Chinese
pottery and porcelain. Horyuji Homotsuden ("Treasures of Horyuji" Building)
is also well worth a visit for its collection of relics from Horyuji, one of Japan's
oldest temples, located in the ancient capital city of Nara.
Located very close to the Tokyo National Museum is the National Museum of Western Art, a vast storehouse of paintings and sculptures. The museum has a particularly extensive collection of impressionist paintings, ranging from early impressionists Pierre Auguste Renoir and Paul Cezanne to later impressionists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. The museum's 59 sculptures by Auguste Rodin comprise one of the world's foremost Rodin collections, with The Gates of Hell, The Thinker, and The Burghers of Calais among its star attractions. Many of the works housed in the National Museum of Western Art were acquired by a wealthy Japanese shipbuilder in Europe before World War II. |
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