Tokyo National Museum: Why Did I Wait So Long?

The Yokosuka Officer Spouse Club organized a trip to Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park the other day. There were eight or nine of us and we split up once we entered the museum so I did not have to feel guilty about lollygagging in some galleries and breezing through others.

Ancient artifacts never fail to arrest me.  How is it that thousands of years before Christ walked on earth people in South America, Egypt, China, and Japan fashioned tools and shaped statues and developed burial rituals that resemble each other so much?  Dr. T has noticed the similarities as well and that makes me feel more confident about my observations.

My pace quickens once I enter the main building (there are four or five buildings in total).  The swords and samurai armor and pottery look an awful lot like the swords, samurai armor, and pottery the Ancient Mariner, College Boy, and I have seen in museums throughout Japan.  Then I turn a corner and enter the Kuroda Gallery.

Kuroda Seiki is the pseudonym adopted by Kuroda Kiyoteru, a Japanese artist who trained in France in the late nineteenth century.  Kuroda went to France to study law when he was 20 but decided to be a painter instead.  When he returned to Japan ten years later, he brought Western techniques with him and shocked the Japanese art world with his penchant for nude models.   

"A Maiko Girl" 1893

Kuroda had lived one-third of his life outside Japan by the time he began painting Japanese subjects. The critics said Kuroda seemed to be looking at his countrymen through the eyes of a foreigner. Maybe that's why his art appeals to me.

Other than "A Maiko Girl", the gallery walls are lined with studies for "Talk on Ancient Romance". As I study his sketches of a young girl in a kimono leaning on a man's shoulder, I notice she is wearing an elaborate kimono in one picture and a much plainer kimono in the next. This is like looking at pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I can hardly wait to reach the end of the gallery where I expect to see how all these pieces came together in what must be an enormous masterpiece. But I force myself to inch along and I learn a few things about composition in the process.

"Talk on Ancient Romance" was commissioned by the Sumitomo family and completed in 1896. The Sumitomo family is to Japan what the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Astor families were to the United States in the late nineteenth century. They were, and still are, industrialists and bankers.

When I eventually reach the end of the gallery I learn that "Talk on Ancient Romance" did not survive World War II. The Sumitomo villa in which it was displayed was bombed. The ensuing fire destroyed the villa's contents.

War is so devastating. How long will it take us to figure this out?