Nara National Museum Audio Guide

Nara National Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Nara National Museum

   Welcome to the Nara National Museum, known in Japanese as Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan. You are in Noborioji-cho, in the city of Nara. This was Japan's capital from 710 to 784, and the museum counts as one of the country's pre-eminent national art museums, with a special focus on Buddhist art. The story here is also about rescue. In the years after the Meiji Restoration, temples and shrines in Nara were struggling, and many sacred images and paintings were at risk of being lost or scattered. A museum was one way to protect them. Today the grounds hold a grand nineteenth-century building, two later exhibition wings, a garden, a historic tea house, a museum shop and a restaurant. Over the next few stops we will look at why the museum was founded, the French-style building that greeted its first visitors, the modern wings and the conservation work, and finally the treasures you can hope to meet inside.

2. 02

   Why Nara National Museum Was Founded

   To understand this museum, go back to the early Meiji era. In 1868 came the Haibutsu Kishaku movement, a campaign to abolish Buddhism, and it hit Nara especially hard. Statues and paintings were damaged, stolen or dispersed. In 1875 a land-confiscation edict also stripped temples and shrines of their estates and left them in financial trouble. Setting up a museum to shelter their treasures was one of the main aims behind the project. There was a prelude. An event called the Nara Hakurankai, or Nara Expo, displayed valuable temple treasures in the cloister of the Great Buddha Hall of Todaiji Temple, including treasures of the Shosoin Imperial Storehouse. It ran until 1894, and it helped the public see these works as cultural assets worth keeping. In the same period the government placed museums under the Imperial Household Agency, in 1886, and surveyed cultural properties across the country in 1888. The museum opened in 1895 as the Imperial Nara Museum. Its first display list drew on imperial collection loans, works sent from the Imperial Museum in Tokyo, and private owners. Temples and shrines had not yet lent works. Among the imperial loans were treasures from Horyuji Temple: a portrait of Prince Shotoku, the Hokke Gisho, a dragon-headed water bottle and a figure of Lady Maya with her attendants. Temple loans grew popular after an exhibition of National Treasures from across Nara Prefecture in 1903.

3. 03

   Architecture at Nara National Museum

   The original building is a Meiji-period showpiece. It was designed by Katayama Tokuma, who lived from 1854 to 1917 and served as an architect for the Imperial Household Agency. It was completed in 1894 in the French Renaissance style, and it is known especially for the rich decorative ornamentation around its West Entrance. It is regarded as a representative Western-style building of the Meiji period, and it is designated an Important Cultural Property. The later wings tell another chapter. The West Wing was designed by Junzo Yoshimura. Construction began on the eighteenth of December 1970 and finished on the thirty-first of March 1972. The East Wing was inaugurated in October 1997 and opened in April 1998, and its architectural style is in keeping with the West Wing. There is also a smaller, older piece of architecture on the grounds. Hassoan is a tea house that Nara residents successfully petitioned to preserve for future generations. It was given to the museum and moved onto the grounds in 1892. A French Renaissance facade, a modern wing and a tea house all sit on one site, which gives the museum its blend of Japanese and Western architectural styles.

4. 04

   Treasures and Care at Nara National Museum

   As of the end of March 2020, the museum's own collection numbered 1,911 items, including 13 National Treasures and 114 Important Cultural Properties. It also looked after 1,974 works on deposit, among them 52 National Treasures and 306 Important Cultural Properties. Among the museum's best-known works are the Silk-painted Eleven-faced Kannon and the Hell Scroll, called Jigoku Zoshi. Every autumn the museum holds its Shosoin Exhibition, presenting items from the Nara-period imperial repository at Todaiji Temple. The link goes back a long way. In 1931 the museum held an exhibition of the fragmentary textile treasures of the Shosoin, to show the results of restoration work. Its Nara Buddhist Sculpture Hall, which reopened in 2010 in the Main Building, offers a way into Nara's long story as capital through sculpture. The museum is not only a place for display. The Conservation Center, opened in 2002, exists to rescue, examine, document, conserve and restore National Treasures and other key cultural properties. Restorers who specialize in sculptures, paintings and ancient texts work there, and specialists advise the people who own and look after cultural assets. In a way, this continues the rescue mission that began in 1895.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from Nara National Museum

   Part of what makes this museum interesting is how many chapters it has lived through. It opened in 1895 as the Imperial Nara Museum and closed in July 1945. In 1947 it passed to the Ministry of Education as a branch of the national museum, and it has carried its present name since 1952. Since 2007 it has been run by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage. In the 2019 fiscal year it welcomed about 610,000 visitors. As you wander, try reading the place as layers: the ornate Meiji facade, the Yoshimura wing, the quiet corner where the tea house sits. Look, too, at how the exhibitions change from season to season. If you are visiting in autumn, ask whether the Shosoin Exhibition is on, and notice how a story that began in a cloister at Todaiji in the nineteenth century still shapes what you see today. The museum's own pointers invite you to look beyond the galleries to the historic buildings, the garden, the experience space, the shop and the restaurant. Which of those will become your favorite corner?