Day Eight - Nagoya.

Because I was feeling way more frustrated than I would generally care to admit about my continued lack of painted handscrolls in Kyoto, I decided to get out of the city for the day and go to nearby Nagoya for some museum hopping. I had it in mind to visit the Tokugawa Museum of Art (a place that had been on my hit list for years) as well as the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts (mainly because I'd read a fair bit about the space and was curious to see it in practice).

I jumped on a shinkansen HIKARI Super-express and reached Nagoya in half-an-hour. Then I made a quick change to the JR Chuo line, and found myself at the Tokugawa museum before 11am. (At the Ozone Station, I stopped to ask directions from one of the JR attendants, and I'm really happy to report that the directions were accurate, complex, and completely understood by yours truly. I really am getting better at this Japanese stuff, and it is unbelievably convenient to speak the language.)

My visit to the Tokugawa Museum of Art was an epic win. Not only were there all kinds of cool early, medieval, and early-modern artifacts (intelligently arranged to present a view of daimyo life), but there were great paintings - including a personal favorite: the Hyakki yakou emaki (Picture Scroll of the Night March of One-Hundred Demons). I've always loved this scroll, and having a chance to see a large portion of it up close and personal was so cool.

And it got the old wheels turning, too. See, part of what I've been doing out here is search for examples of grotesque imagery. I'm really trying to think about horror motifs and their connection to the politics and social structure of various periods. But I've really been having trouble with how to conceptualize a project of that nature. Looking at the Hyakki yakou emaki (and some other images in the exhibition on Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu that was currently showing) really helped me to fine tune some of my thinking.

Über score, yo.

The Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts wasn't nearly as interesting. Handicapped by the lack of actual collection of their own, they're kind of stuck with whatever the MFA sends them to show. This time there was an exhibit on the representation of Venus from the early Greeks to the contemporary era (of no real interest to me... sorry! If I were on a vacation, I'd be happy to look them over, but on a research trip... not so much) and a presentation of Noritake porcelains and fine china (undoubtedly beautiful, but of little academic interest to me personally).

Still it was an interesting space; kind of an auxiliary depot of the MFA. Lots of MFA-themed merchandise to buy and so-forth. I realize that the function of this museum is to provide more people with the opportunity to see masterworks from the MFA collection, which is awesome, but the cynic in me cannot help but wonder how much revenue this venue nets them. There were quite a lot of people there on a Tuesday afternoon. (A fact which makes perfect sense, really. It's nonsense to think that Japanese people only ever want to see Japanese art.)

I didn't do much else in Nagoya. I had considered going to the castle, but I decided that I didn't feel like tramping around a replica - particularly as I didn't want to lose the painting-headspace I was in at the time. I've seen castles a plenty, and I'll see more in the future.

I returned to Kyoto just a little after 4pm, and decided to head back and make an easy evening of it. My body is still a bit fatigued from all of the walking (exacerbated today by the acquisition of several heavy books at the Tokugawa Museum of Art), and I have plans to do walking tours of Nara and Mount Hiei later this week. I'll be more ready for those expeditions if I go a little easy.

After all, it's not like I've been lazy bum thus far.