Day Four: Tokyo National Museum

A sad sight of wet Tokyo that greeted me this morning upon waking up decided my itinerary for today. I decided to load up on some culture and with that in mind set off towards Tokyo National Museum. It's one of the museums located around Ueno Park and according to the guide "if you are only going to visit one museum, make it a Tokyo National Museum". Museum is actually comprised of four separate buildings but I only visited the one dedicated to the Japanese Arts.

Even in this building I was interested only in few particular sections but ended up walking through all the exhibits and have to admit that they were worth it. I liked the layout of the place and how everything was nicely spaced out and arranged such that you didn't get overwhelmed by too many objects and could see everything without walking in circles.

I started out my tour with some impressive samurai armor:

Armor was accompanied by few common weapons, among them some very nice tachi swords and a naginata blade.

Then, after admiring very pretty screens and lacquerware and skipping paintings and calligraphy, I moved to the archaeological section. On display there is some of the world's oldest pottery - 10,000 years old Jomon pottery. What I found amazing was the fact that 10,000 years ago people already made an effort to decorate their everyday objects. Personally, I wouldn't have bothered :)

There were also interesting terra-cotta figures called haniwa. They come in different shapes and supposedly the house or boat shaped ones were meant as temporary dwellings for souls of the deceased, while others, that became popular a bit later, in addition to having some ritual value, would also somehow reflect the personality or occupation of the buried person.

In 1052 Japanese very unoriginally were concerned with the supposed decline in morals and attributed the sad state of the world (apparently they were plagued by a slew of natural disasters) to the end of Buddhist law. According to them, 5,670,000,000 after the decline of Buddhism Maitreya, the future Buddha, would come to preach again. They didn't want to count on Maitreya to bring his own propaganda, so they prepared special Sutra Mounds to store the appropriate literature in special cases. Then the archeologists showed up and dug up the mounds and put cases on display, so I am not sure what the Maitreya is going to do now.

As you probably expect, my favourite part of the museum was the Swords and Sword-fittings collection. It wasn't as large as I was hoping for but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. In addition to the blades from various periods, which can't truly be appreciated while they are behind the glass, there were some lovely fittings.

Menuki (Small decorations on the hilt. They were, supposedly, originally used to provide a better grip. Since at some point after all the fittings acquired their traditional places the way the swords are held had changed, menuki became purely decorative):