Tokyo National Museum

The Tokyo National Museum traces its origins to an exhibition held at the Yushima Seidō in 1872, the first public museum exhibition organised by the new Meiji government. It moved to Ueno in 1882 and, as the Imperial Household Museum, became the country's principal museum of its own art and antiquities. It is run today by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage.

The collection spans Jōmon pottery and haniwa figures, Buddhist sculpture, calligraphy, ink painting, folding screens, lacquer, swords and armour, ceramics, textiles and ukiyo-e prints, alongside art from China, Korea, Central and South-East Asia and Egypt. Among its best-known works are Hasegawa Tōhaku's screens of pine trees in mist and Sesshū's autumn and winter landscapes. Because light damages paper and silk, works are shown in rotation, so the displays change several times a year.

The museum's buildings are an architectural history in themselves: the Honkan of 1938, a concrete building with a Japanese tiled roof; the Hyōkeikan of 1908, a domed Western-style hall by the court architect Katayama Tōkuma; the Tōyōkan for Asian art; the Heiseikan for archaeology and special exhibitions; and the Gallery of Hōryū-ji Treasures by Taniguchi Yoshio.

The museum was born in the first years of Meiji, when the government collected Japanese art and crafts for display at home and at the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873. The first main building in Ueno, by the British architect Josiah Conder, opened in 1882 and was ruined in the 1923 earthquake.

After a design competition calling for an 'Oriental style based on Japanese taste', the present Honkan by Watanabe Jin opened in 1938. The museum was transferred from the Imperial Household to the state in 1947 and took its present name in 1952. The treasures presented by Hōryū-ji to the imperial household in 1878 are shown in their own gallery, rebuilt in 1999.

As the national museum of the capital, the Tokyo National Museum holds a central place in how Japan presents its own art. It is responsible for some of the most important National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties and hosts major special exhibitions that draw large crowds, often built around a single temple's treasures or an artist such as Sesshū or Tōhaku.

The museum is also part of Ueno Park's cluster of cultural institutions. Its surroundings — the National Museum of Western Art, the National Museum of Nature and Science, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and Tokyo University of the Arts — make Ueno the densest museum district in Japan.