Garden in the Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Art – forest bathing in the heart of Tokyo with a touch of wabi-sabi

 

Last weekend, I went to an exhibition of tea ceremony equipment at the Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art.  Located in Shirokane residential area in the heart of Tokyo, this art museum is rather a smaller art museum in Tokyo. However, they have a fine collection especially for notable tea ceremony and Noh (Japanese old playwright) equipment.

 

Despite the size of the museum, this place has an extra to appeal visitors – the garden. Walking in the woods aside with moss covered ground, old tea room architectures, well-patterned stone paving, and porcelain benches was such a valuable moment.

 

The museum does not advertise much about their exhibitions as the larger-scaled art museums do. So, there’s less crowd - you can enjoy the collections and the garden in the “calm and quiet manner”. I’d like to emphasize about this advantage because, in the same weekend, I went to another exhibition of tea ceremony equipment at the National Museum of Art in Ueno, and it ended up a big disappointment: I couldn’t see many of the collection there as the over-crowded visitors swarming around the glass cases.

Kameido Tenjin - the wisteria spot in Tokyo

One of the beautiful blooms in early May in Japan is wisteria. If you live in Europe, you might not be familiar with this flower, since it's known to be found only in the East Asia and North America. In contrast of more wild wisteria found in the US, you find a lot of artificially planted wisteria in Japan, because we've liked to take a good care of this beautiful to plant to see it's best performance when it blooms (also there are wild wisterias in Japan).

Wisteria appears to be mystical when it blooms; numerous of small petals, colored in pale purple, composite like chandelier while spreading mildly sweet scent.

The most well-known wisteria spot in Tokyo is Kameido Tenjin, a Shinto shrine in the east side of the city Tokyo. Not only mass compositions of the chandelier-like bunches, but also there are traditional garden landscape with a large pond, where turtles and carps stay in cozy attitude. In some part of the shrine, the flowers are planted on the stage build on the pond and people walk on the pathways alongside of the stages, or connected between the stages.

The only con about this place in wisteria time is the crowd. Since there's not much wisteria spots in the city of Tokyo, and the place is not big in it's size and the pathways are narrow, it becomes very crowded. So, you may be stressed if you are the like me who try to avoid the crowds as much as possible. But, I still went there - the beauty of the wisteria overcame my stubbornness.