10 Japanese art museums that are ace, and each one of them is out of this world!

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🤗 Karuizawa Senju Hakubo Museum of Art

Karuizawa, Nagano

Karuizawa, known as the “backyard of Tokyo,” has been a representative resort in Japan since the late 19th century. The Japanese imperial family chose Karuizawa as a summer resort because of its beauty; John Lennon spent three consecutive peaceful summer vacations here; Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli found inspiration in Karuizawa's beauty; and the Hoshino family launched the first HOSHINOYA ....... For two centuries, Karuizawa has been a place of art, leisure, niche, and culture. For more than two centuries, Karuizawa has been characterized by art, leisure, niche and pure natural beauty.

Located in Karuizawa-cho, Nagano, Japan, the Chisumihiro Art Museum houses most of the works of the artist Chisumihiro from 1978 to the present. They wanted to integrate this art gallery with the surrounding natural landscape and create an all-natural illuminated space. The project can also be seen as a collaborative work between Hiroshi Chisumi and architect Rikae Nishizawa.

Hiroshi Chisumi is known for his large format waterfall paintings using traditional Japanese techniques and was the first Asian artist to receive the Special Honorary Award at the Venice Biennale. His works have a flowing vibrancy. Waterfall,” ‘Falling Color,’ ‘Flatwater,’ and ‘When the Stardust Falls,’ the image of ‘fall’ (flow) is repeated in his major works.

🤗 Kyocera Art Museum Kyoto

Sakyo-ku, Kyoto

It has been 91 years since this museum, which is loved by people in and around Kyoto, opened in 1933. The Kyocera Museum of Art was originally named “Dairei Memorial Kyoto Museum of Art” and opened in 1933 in the Okazaki district of Kyoto City as a commemoration of the Imperial Ceremony for the Accession of the Emperor Showa. The building was constructed in the imperial “Teikan Style,” which consists of Western-style cement walls and bricks with a Chinese-style roof with flying buttresses.

Since 1952, it has been affectionately called “Kyoto City Museum of Art” by the people of Kyoto. In May 2020, the museum was reopened with a new director, Jun Aoki, a modern Japanese architect, and was awarded the 2020 GOOD DESIGN Award for its renovation. Along with the remodeling, the museum has been officially renamed “Kyocera Art Museum Kyoto” since 2019.

The Museum of Fine Arts has a collection of about 3,800 works, centered on the works of Kyoto painters such as Takeuchi Suho and Uemura Matsunen. A new collection room for displaying these collections was established after the renovation. The exhibits are changed four times a year to match the four seasons in Kyoto. At the Kyocera Museum of Art, you can see the richness of the beauty of Kyoto and Japan at any time.

Kyocera Art Museum Kyoto is located in the heart of Kyoto City with the Otorii of Heian Jingu Shrine and the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art to the west, the Kyoto City Zoo to the east, and the Lake Biwa Drainage Water flowing to the south. As one of the four national public museums and art galleries in Kyoto City, the main building of which is the oldest existing art museum building among the public art museums.

🤗 MonET Satoyama Museum of Art

Juricho, Niigata Prefecture

The Echigo-Tsumari Earth Art Festival is the largest international outdoor art festival in the world.

The Echigo-Tsumari Earth Art Festival, which began in 2000 and is held every three years, is the largest international outdoor art festival in the world. The festival aims to revitalize local villages through the power of art, the wisdom of local people, and the rich resources of the region. Today, the Echigo Tsumari Earth Art Festival has become one of Niigata's most famous cultural symbols.

The Satoyama Museum of Art in Echigo-Tsumari is one of the main stages of the Echigo-Tsumari Earth Art Festival, and was born from the renovation of an old textile factory by renowned architect Hiroshi Hara, which was used for the 2nd Echigo-Tsumari Earth Art Festival in 2003. It is now the hub of the festival, with a collection of contemporary art exhibitions, an art store, a restaurant, and a space for children's aesthetic education, and so on.

In 2012, it was renovated to become the Echigo-Tsumari Satoyama Museum of Contemporary Art Kinare. It is a permanent exhibition hall where many artists' works are exhibited.

🤗 Okada Museum of Art

Hakone-cho, Kanagawa

Opened in 2013, the Okada Museum of Art is a five-story building with a total of 5,000 square meters of exhibition space. The museum exhibits ceramics and paintings from Japan, Korea and Japan, with 450 pieces on permanent display. The museum is rich in Japanese works from the Edo period onward. A variety of artists are gathered here, including Tawaraya Sotatsu, Ogata Korin, Sakai Koichi, and Kanzaka Yukiya of the Rin school of the Edo period, the ukiyo-e style represented by Kitagawa Gomaro and Katsushika Hokusai, and the masters of Kyoto's painting world, such as Motoyama Ojue and Ito Wakacho.

The most unique feature of the Okada Museum of Art is its Foot Soup Cafe. Imagine what it's like to eat ice cream while soaking in a warm foot bath. There's also the Japanese-style Kaifa-tei, where you can enjoy Japanese-style seating, Japanese-style cuisine, and a view out the glass doors and windows.

🤗 Adachi Art Museum

Yasurai City, Shimane Prefecture

Founded in 1970, the Adachi Art Museum is an art museum that exhibits various works of art based on the art collection of Mr. Chikan Adachi, who was born in Yasurai City.

It has been ranked as the No. 1 garden in Japan for 21 consecutive years by the American magazine SUKIYA LIVING MAGAZINE, and is regarded by many as “the most beautiful garden in Japan” and a three-star Michelin attraction.

The garden of the Adachi Art Museum covers an area of 50,000 square meters, and is based on the design drawings of Nakane Kanemaku, a renowned Japanese landscape architect and garden designer, who used a borrowed landscape to visually integrate the landscape, which was not originally part of the park, with the other scenery, reflecting the unity of “harmony”. It can be said that it is a masterpiece of the fake mountain and forest spring garden and the withered landscape garden.

The museum consists of six 50,000-square-meter courtyards, including the “Kusan Shui Garden,” “White Sand and Pine Garden,” “Moss Garden,” “Pond Garden,” “Shouri-an,” and “Turtle Crane Waterfall,” which visually integrate the landscape, which does not belong to the park, with the other landscapes, reflecting a sense of unity in the form of harmony.

🤗 Mitaka no Mori Ghibli Museum

Mitaka City, Tokyo

Located in Mitaka City, Tokyo, Japan, the Ghibli Museum is owned by Hayao Miyazaki, who is also a writer, manga artist, and animation director. The first director was Hayao Miyazaki's eldest son, Goro Miyazaki, and on June 24, 2005, Kiyofumi Nakajima took over as the second director. The name “Ghibli” is interesting. Hayao Miyazaki's animation studio and art museum are both called Ghibli, which is a translation of the Italian word Ghibli, which refers to the hot winds blowing in the Sahara Desert. It is called “Ghibli” because “in this museum, both wind and light can come and go freely.”

Today, “Ghibli″ has become one of the most famous animation studios in all of Japan. It is not difficult to understand that the name “Ghibli” is associated with an art museum, which is actually equal to the Miyazaki's animation exhibition hall. It can be said that everyone who likes Hayao Miyazaki will make a “pilgrimage” here, so if you have the opportunity to come to Japan, you should not miss it. Mitaka-no-mori Ghibli Museum of Art has 3 floors and a roof garden. It's not a big place, but the contents of the exhibition are very rich, so it's worth a visit.

🤗 Otsuka International Art Museum

Naruto City, Tokushima

The Otsuka International Museum of Art is the former Pottery Plate Museum of Art, which was established in Naruto City, Tokushima Prefecture by Otsuka Pharmaceutical, one of Japan's leading pharmaceutical manufacturers, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its founding. The museum covers an area of nearly 30,000 square meters, and the length of the gallery, which consists of five floors from the third basement to the second floor above ground, is 4 kilometers.

The Museum of Fine Arts has reproduced more than 1,000 masterpieces of Western painting on encaustic panels in the same dimensions as the originals, using a special technique. These works include carefully selected ancient frescoes and modern paintings from the collections of more than 190 art museums in 26 countries around the world. The interior of the Sistine Chapel is also reproduced in three dimensions, including Michelangelo's powerful frescoes of the ceiling and the front altarpiece, The Last Judgment, making it a must-see in Tokushima.

🤗 Fujishiro Kiyoharu Museum of Art

Nasu Town, Tochigi Prefecture

When it comes to Seiji Fujishiro, most of you who follow picture books have seen his drawings, and even if you haven't, his shadow drawings are unforgettable to look at.

Kiyoharu Fujishiro, born in Tokyo in 1924, showed his talent for drawing from a young age, and after experiencing a variety of creative styles such as watercolor and oil painting, he developed a strong interest in puppetry and thus focused on the creation of children's illustrated books.In 1983, he wrote the illustrated book “Night of the Galaxy Railway”, which won the Golden Apple Award at the BIB International Illustrated Book Exhibition, and it has become one of his masterpieces. Fujishiro's typical method of creation is to use a variety of different materials. Fujishiro's typical method of creation is to use a blade to carve paper, collage the picture, and then place it on top of a light box, so that the light and the picture made up of paper cuttings together form a unique light and shadow effect, which is called shadow painting. Colorful shadow painting is a unique folk craft in Japan.

Simply put, it is to engrave a few to dozens of thin pieces of paper on the surface of light-transmitting cellophane, make the paper into various images of people or animals, and then adjust the overlap of the paper and the transparency of the light to express the beauty of light and shadow of the paper under the refraction of the light. Entering the museum is like stepping into the fantasy world of a movie or television production, and you can enjoy the exquisite design of the museum that blends light and shadow. For this reason, the Seiji Fujishiro Museum of Art has long been recognized as one of the top ten museums to visit in Japan.

🤗 Tokyo National New Art Museum

Minato-ku, Tokyo

The New National Art Museum is the most popular art museum in Tokyo, with an exhibition area of 14,000 square meters. In addition to the museum, which was designed with the concept of an “art museum in the forest,” there are 12 exhibition rooms, an art library, a lecture hall, a training room, and other facilities, and the curved glass curtain wall on the south side of the museum, which is as graceful and tense as rolling waves, and the conical main entrance, which creates a unique appearance. The curved glass curtain wall on the south side is as graceful and tense as rolling waves, creating a unique appearance with the conical main entrance. Personally, I think this place is not about exhibitions, but about an exhibition-plus lifestyle. In a city like Tokyo, where there is a strong sense of boundaries and traffic, it's really super chill to have a place where light and shadow are intertwined, where the architecture and exhibitions are worth seeing, and where you can sit down with a cup of coffee and a book and laze around.

🤗 Toshima Museum of Art

Tojo-cho, Kagawa

The Toshima Museum of Art, located in Toshima, Seto Inland Sea, Japan, was designed by Ritsugu Nishizawa in collaboration with artist Rei Naito for the 2010 Setouchi International Art Festival, and was opened to the public at the end of 2010 as a project that fully integrates architecture and art. The Toshima Museum of Art, built on a hill overlooking the Seto Inland Sea in Toshima's Tōkanai neighborhood, was designed by artist Rei Naito and architect Rikui Nishizawa for the 2010 Setouchi International Art Festival. Inspired by water drops in nature, Tatewei Nishizawa's design harmonizes with the surrounding natural environment with its smooth curves and soft contours.

The large holes in the exterior surface of the building allow sunlight, rain and fresh entry into the air inside. The building is intended to create a dynamic space that is both closed for displaying works of art and open to the outside environment.