Wet day in Tokyo. It started to rain about the time we left our hotel and now that we’re back it’s still coming down. So we went with the big indoor option, the Tokyo National Museum. The permanent collection had a thousand-year-old Buddhist guardian statues carved out of wood.
Then there was Wisdom King Fudo. The exhibit card read: : “Heian peried, 11th century. Wood with pigment. Fudô is a powerful god who fights evil and intimidates stubborn unbelievers into following Buddhism. He holds a sword that euts through ignorance and a lasso that pulls people toward salvation. The rocky pedestal symbolizes his unshakable nature.”
Wait a minute? What happened to the peace and serenity? Well, okay, how about a room full of wavy tempered samurai swords.
Followed by room of ceramics that included a glazed picnic box.
So fine, but we also had tickets to the special exhibition that featured Tsutaya Jūzaburō, founder and head of the Tsutaya publishing house in Edo (now Tokyo) who produced illustrated books and ukiyo-e woodblock prints of many of the period’s most famous artists. Crossing the hallway to the exhibition we saw a line of people waiting to put on a virtual reality headset that purported to immerse them into an Edo-era street scene. I couldn’t resist. When it got around to me putting on a headset, I had a choice of a day, or night scene. I chose night. It was strange. My movement around Edo nightlife was limited to turning my head and observing a geisha being led down the street in raised wooden footwear that looked like blocky wooden bricks meant to impede movement. Then there was a clumsy edit and I was observing the geisha reading. So, okay, not exactly action packed. Another stumbling edit and I was observing a different geisha slumped on a bench, libidinally exhausted, with an opium pipe in her hand. That was it. Edo and out.
This made me a bit worried about what I was going to encounter in the Jūzaburō exhibition. But the woodblock prints from The Tsutaya publishing house were a revelation. Covering the period from the late 18th century to the early nineteen hundreds, they were colorful, candid pictures of Edo nightlife.
The exhibition had a room dedicated to reconstructing an Edo neighborhood with Mt. Fuji in the background. We saw it during the day, we saw it during the night. At night there were fireworks. It was a spookily unsettling after viewing the Hiroshima exhibits.
Do you take notes as you go along ?
A couple hours later things are still pretty fresh in the old memory; if something is of lasting interest, I snap a pic of the description card.
That’s a must see museum. If you care to look at my home webpage (https://www.cs.unm.edu/~shapiro/) you will see an ink of paper Chinese painting called Li Po Chanting a Poem, which just happens to be in the Tokyo National Museum.
A lot of the exhibits at the museum won’t allow photography, which is a shame. It’s really frustrating when you see a great woodblock print and worry that memory won’t serve.