Former Imperial Kyoto Museum

A Brick Complex Built for a New Kind of Institution

The Former Imperial Kyoto Museum (旧帝国京都博物館, Kyū Teikoku Kyōto Hakubutsukan) is a group of four brick structures on the grounds of the Kyoto National Museum in Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto, completed in 1895 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 12 March 1969. The four are the main hall, the front gate, and two ticket-booth-and-wing-wall units, one on the north side of the gate and one on the south.

The main hall covers 2,896.5 square metres of ground area, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs register. It is single-storey, built of brick, and roofed in sangawara pantiles with sections of slate and copper sheeting. Stone is set into the brickwork at the corners, the window surrounds, and the base course, so the wall reads as banded rather than uniform. The centre of the entrance front carries a large decorated gable.

The designer was Katayama Tōkuma (片山東熊), an engineer in the Imperial Household Ministry's Bureau of Construction and Repairs, the Takumiryō. Katayama went on to design the Akasaka Detached Palace in Tokyo, and the Kyoto building shows the same training: a French Renaissance and Baroque vocabulary handled with restraint. Construction finished in 1895; the museum opened to the public on 1 May 1897 as the Imperial Kyoto Museum. The building is known today as the Meiji Kotokan (明治古都館), a name it acquired when the newer Heisei Chishinkan gallery opened alongside it.

Behind the design lies a specific administrative problem. In 1888 the government surveyed temple and shrine holdings across Japan and found that Kyoto and Nara held concentrations of objects with no proper storage. National museums for both cities were authorised the following year. The Kyoto building was therefore purpose-built for collections that had never before been housed outside the institutions that owned them.

Why the Four Buildings Were Listed Together

The Agency for Cultural Affairs treats the group as a surviving example of mid-Meiji architecture, and the reasoning turns on completeness rather than on the main hall alone. The gate and the wing walls date from the original construction campaign, which means the boundary between street and museum precinct still works the way Katayama planned it.

The front gate is brick with iron doors, flanked by guardhouses with flat roofs. The north ticket booth and wing wall run 32.3 metres along their turns; the southern unit runs 158.3 metres, sweeping down toward Shichijō Street. Both carry iron railings above the brick base, so the precinct is enclosed without being sealed off from view.

Attached to the listing are items that make this case unusual. Six hundred and thirty construction drawings from the Takumiryō survive, along with two models of the main hall's roof truss, one prototype carving for a capital, three for gable ornament, one for a frame moulding, and a ridge tablet. A pair of doors from the former south gate is attached to the north ticket booth entry. Nineteenth-century Japanese buildings rarely retain their working drawings; here the design process is documented alongside the result.

Not everyone welcomed the building at the time. Objections were raised that a Western structure had no business in the old capital. A century on, the red brick has settled into the Higashiyama streetscape well enough that the argument is hard to reconstruct.

What You Can Actually See, and When

The interior of the main hall is closed. The museum has suspended exhibitions there while it works through a basic plan for seismic isolation retrofitting, and the building is listed as normally closed to the public. Occasional special openings are announced: one was held on 14 March 2026 as part of the run-up to the museum's 130th anniversary in 2027. If seeing the inside matters to you, check the museum's event page before travelling, because these openings are not scheduled on any regular cycle.

The exterior is a different matter. The front gate is visible from Yamato-ōji Street before you buy a ticket, and the southern wing wall can be followed on foot along Shichijō. Once inside, the garden gives the main hall's full frontage, with Rodin's The Thinker placed on the axis between gate and entrance. The bronze came to the museum on deposit in 1950 and passed into national ownership in 1956.

Admission depends on what is running. During Masterpiece Gallery periods, when the permanent collection is on display in the Heisei Chishinkan, general admission is 700 yen. Between exhibition changeovers the museum sometimes opens the garden only, at 300 yen including a garden guide booklet. Special exhibitions set their own prices. Friday evenings currently have extended hours.

Photography outdoors, including the brick buildings and the garden, is generally permitted. Inside the galleries the rules vary by object and by exhibition, so follow the signage rather than assuming.

Getting there is straightforward. From Kyoto Station, city buses reach the Hakubutsukan Sanjūsangendō-mae stop in about ten minutes, and the museum entrance is immediately there. From Keihan Shichijō Station it is roughly a seven-minute walk east. Sanjūsangendō stands directly across the road, and Yōgen-in is a short walk beyond it, so the three can be combined in a morning.