sechan19 | Kanazawa Day One.

The weather forecast stated that the chance of rain was gobu gobu (fifty-fifty), and though my walk down the main drag was warm and partially sunny, I saw the dark clouds on the horizon and decided that my walking tour of the castle and Kenroku park would have to wait.

I decided to knock all of my museums out in one shot. I hit the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of History, The Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art, the Nakamura Museum of Art, and the Yasue Gold Leaf Museum of Kanazawa. Impressive, no?

The Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of History* was the reason I had decided to come to Kanazawa. This past summer when I was in Kyoto, I noticed a poster for an exhibition of the treasures of Nishi Honganji (always spelled Hongwanji for some reason) and resolved to go if at all possible. I wasn't disappointed in the collection, which included hanging scrolls, handscrolls, letters, poetry collections, and a wide collection of decorative and ritual objects.

Included in the collection was a rather large number of paintings of nuns, something I'd never really seen before. I always see portraits of founders and priests but never of nuns. They seemed to have an equivalent level of iconographic similitude as do portraits of priests, but they did strike me nonetheless. In another life, I'll give them a study...

It was raining heavily when I left the museum, so I made a beeline for the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art. It had just closed an exhibit of pre-modern treasures in favor of the annual exhibition for local craftsmen. The works included in the show covered the arts of ceramics, basketry, textiles, lacquerware, metalworking, glass, and carpentry. Many of them were extremely beautiful. And yet, I was rather unmoved by them.

In contrast to the flights of modern fancy I'd been treated too at last week's basketry exhibition in the Aka renga, the basketry on display here was staid and traditional. And the other arts were lovely, but seemed somehow to serve no purpose beyond continuing the process of creation for creation's sake.

Perhaps I've become too enmeshed in the reconstruction of function when it comes to observing objects. After all, the main drive of my work is to attempt to fathom out who made something and, most importantly, why they made it. Many of the objects I've looked at over the years are devastatingly beautiful, but that is not what makes them interesting. Human beings tend to like beautiful things, so there's nothing much to think about when you travel down that path. Instead, it's about why someone chose this particular beautiful thing to cherish, or to teach with, or to wield as a weapon of propaganda.

As I wandered in the exhibit, I couldn't help feeling that many of these works would never leave the confines of a glass case: that they would never "live." It was as if they'd been robbed of their souls, if that makes sense.

But enough of that. Upstairs in the permanent collection I was wowed by a thirteenth-century Tengu zôshi (Scroll of the Long-Nosed Goblin). (That's definitely going to get a closer study from me. Although there were no reproductions of it in any of the books on sale in the museum shop, it seems that the subject matter has been treated in publications that are available online.) The displays of modern art were ofttimes whimsical and seemed to have a kind of haphazard arrangement that made them difficult to connect with, but there were a number of intriguing works on display - particularly by nihonga artists.

Leaving the art museum, the rain was still pounding down. I took a winding staircase behind the museum building that led into the gardens of the Nakamura Art Museum. There was a special exhibition of local craftsmen (autumn must be the season for that) that didn't much interest me, but the preserved home of the museum founder was a delight that boasted a number of incredible works. Chief among them was a set of folding screens by the painting Unkoku Tôgan - the great rival of Hasegawa Tôhaku. The screen depicted a Chinese landscape and very definitively demonstrated the ways in which Tôgan attempted to lay claim to the Sesshu lineage through his painting style.

I was treated to a guided tour in the Nakamura Museum, and the entire trip became a fantastic study. I had a chance to speak with the guides, ask some questions about the pieces, and generally enjoyed myself immensely.

My stomach was rumbling by the time I left, and it was still raining with a kind of ferocity, so I decided it was time to hole up for lunch. The little hole-in-the-walls were all closed, as I had museum hopped my way through the traditional lunch hour, so I found a shopping center to forage in and faired pretty well.**

With lunch over, I thought that I might have just enough time to catch the Yasue Gold Leaf Museum if I hurried. I jumped on a bus headed for Kanazawa Station (an action that had the added bonus of further keeping me out of the rain), and then walked the short distance to the museum. It was an absolutely lovely little place, I have to say. The entrace fee was only about $4, and it included a brief introductory tour, a cup of tea with gold leaves, and a live demonstration of gold leaf cutting. They had a fantastic collection of folding screens and other gold leaf objects in the upstairs exhibition space (including a "Tale of Genji" folding screen painted by a member of the Tosa family and sporting that classic Tosa family golden cloud style).

I was the last entrant, and I ran a little bit over the closing time, I think, but everyone was very gracious to me.

Back at the guesthouse, I settled in for the evening. I chatted with new arrivals, including a very nice man from Sendai - Suzuki-san - and some guys from England and Australia. I walked a rather long way today, so I suspect I'll pack it in early again. I'm hoping for better weather on the morrow. I can't come all the way to Kanazawa and not see the Kenrokuen - heralded as one of three premiere gardens in all of Japan. That would just be ridiculous.

So rain or no rain, I'm going. But I'm really hoping for "no rain."

* See my earlier post for more on my adventures there.
** See my earlier post for more on my lunch adventures.