It belongs in a museum!

The Tokyo National Museum is in Ueno, which has at least 100 years or so of history as a giant park full of technology exhibitions and displays.

There are five galleries, but we only actually went into the main building (honkan) which holds the Japanese Gallery. This is a collection of Japanese art across multiple disciplines, metalworking, ceramics, fabrics, painting, sculpture etc. It also includes a rotation of artifacts from the National Treasure Gallery.

It's all very impressive - all the works from the Shogunate onwards are clearly the very best examples of the most refined works of Japanese art and much of it has an illustrious history being the former belongs of great and powerful people.

But to be honest, I actually thought the gift shop was the coolest bit!

You could even buy actual artifacts in it...? I guess when you've got so much history to choose from, you can afford to sell some of it... very large and eclectic range of Japanese style arts and crafts.

Tokyo National Museum has a cover charge to get into the main area, access to the special exhibits costs extra.

Observations:

I'm not sure Indiana Jones has anything Japanese to steal and put in a museum - they already seem to have it. It is a bit of an old school kinda place though - lots of precious items locked away in glass boxes.

What makes it a bit different to one of our old-school museums though is all the art forms represented are still practiced today. Whereas we tend to create museums to preserve art forms no longer practiced, the Japanese version seems to be more about explaining where their current art forms came from. Everything in the honkan is still actually being made to traditional methods today - there are no "lost" arts here!

Kaiju Collected: None - the museum has already collected them all.Read more