Nezu Museum 根津美術館

Nezu Museum Tokyo

The Nezu Museum is a cultural and scenic highlight of Tokyo's fashionable Aoyama district, combining sweeping modern architecture with elegant traditional landscaping. The Museum is at the end of the upmarket Omotesando boulevard.

The Nezu Museum collection is of pre-modern Japanese and East Asian art, acquired mainly by Kaichiro Nezu (1860-1940), president of the Tobu Railway, throughout his career, and housed in its current location by his son in 1940. Numerous private donations of works have since added to the collection's size.

The museum was completed in 2009 and designed by the renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, famous for the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee, Scotland. The architect has created a natural wonder with large glass walls and a tiled ceiling. Like the Japanese master gardeners, he incorporates elements in distance, a technique called "Borrowed Scenery", based on the principle of not opposing the outside with the inside.

Garden

The garden behind the Museum is every bit as memorable as the museum building. Occupying a small, beautifully landscaped valley, the garden's undulating paths are lined with ancient statues and monuments, mainly of stone, and take visitors around a pond, natural-like features such as a waterfall, and a picturesque tea house where tea ceremony-related exhibits can sometimes be seen. The garden - carefully restored after its wartime destruction - is a serene world, with its water features and wildlife, far removed from the contemporary consumerism of Omotesando, just minutes' walk away.