Former Tokyo Imperial Museum Main Building

A Museum That Is Also an Exhibit

The Former Tokyo Imperial Museum Main Building (旧東京帝室博物館本館, Kyū Tōkyō Teishitsu Hakubutsukan Honkan) is a museum building completed in 1937 in Ueno Park, Taito City, Tokyo, and it was designated an Important Cultural Property on 15 June 2001. Visitors know it today under a different name: it houses the Honkan, or Japanese Gallery, of the Tokyo National Museum, and most people who climb its front steps are on their way to see something else.

The building it replaced was red brick, designed by Josiah Conder and finished in 1881. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 damaged it past use. Reconstruction took years to fund and organise; the frame was raised on 1 April 1935 and the building was completed on 6 November 1937.

The design came out of a competition, the Prize Competition for Architectural Designs for the Tokyo Imperial Museum. Entrants were told to work in an Eastern manner grounded in Japanese taste, an instruction that shaped everything that followed. Watanabe Jin took first place, and the Imperial Household Ministry's Office of Works carried his winning scheme through to construction.

Concrete Under a Tiled Roof

What Watanabe produced belongs to the manner usually called teikan yōshiki, crown style: a modern building of steel-reinforced concrete carrying a heavy Japanese tiled roof, as though a traditional roof had been set down on a contemporary frame like a crown. The approach was common in Japanese public architecture of the 1930s and it remains contested, since the taste that produced it is bound up with the politics of the period. The Agency for Cultural Affairs sets that argument aside and evaluates the building on execution.

Its designation cites two criteria: outstanding design, and high historical value. The official assessment calls it a large building in a Japanese idiom, accomplished in its design, and one of the works marking the high point reached by Japanese modern architecture in the early Shōwa period. A second reason is given as well, one that has nothing to do with style. The lighting and air-conditioning installed for the display and protection of objects represented the most advanced technical standards available at the time, and that alone is treated as historically significant.

The numbers are substantial. Steel-reinforced concrete construction, a footprint of 6,601.8 square metres, two storeys above ground and two below, a hongawara tile roof, and a porch projecting at the main entrance. Seen from above, the plan forms two courtyards enclosed within a rectangle, a figure Japanese architects describe as shaped like the character 日, with a porte-cochère pushed forward at the centre of the front elevation.

Looking at the Building While Looking at the Collection

Go through the entrance and stop before you turn into the first gallery. The great staircase rises in the middle of the hall, splitting and doubling back, and the display rooms are arranged around it in a loop on both floors. Twenty-six rooms in all, though some are closed or given over to other uses at any given time. Walking the second floor takes you through the sequence titled the flow of Japanese art, with themed rooms on Buddhist art, the art of tea, the dress of the warrior class, and the theatre. The first floor holds galleries organised by material and genre.

Photography for personal use is permitted throughout the Tōhaku Collection galleries, apart from individual works carrying a no-photography mark placed at the lender's request. Flash, extra lighting, monopods, tripods and selfie sticks are all ruled out, and special exhibitions are in principle closed to cameras entirely. That leaves the architecture itself as the most reliable subject: the staircase, the coffered ceilings, the bronze fittings on the doors.

General admission to the Tōhaku Collection is 1,000 yen, 500 yen for university students, and free for anyone of high school age or under, anyone under 18, and anyone aged 70 or over. Opening hours are 9:30 to 17:00, extended to 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays, with last entry half an hour before closing. The museum shuts on Mondays, opening instead when a Monday is a public holiday and closing the next weekday. Gallery closures for environmental work are announced on the museum's site and are worth checking, since rooms in the Honkan come out of service for months at a time.

From the Park Exit of JR Ueno Station the walk takes about ten minutes, the same from the South Exit at Uguisudani. There is no visitor parking. The building stands at the far end of the park's central axis, so the approach across the fountain plaza gives the best view of the front, and the roofline reads most clearly from a distance.