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.