Art in Japan>Asian Art 100B.C.E.-1930>Meiji Kaigakan (Memorial Picture Gallery)

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Meiji Kaigakan (Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery)

by John McGee

Exterior of Meiji Kaigakan (Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery)
(Photos courtesy Meiji Kaigakan)

Each year, millions of visitors stroll deep into the forest of Meiji Jingu, Japan's most popular shrine, to throw their coins and clap in observance of the new year. Lest you forget, the beautiful buildings and park-like grounds are dedicated to Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shoken. 

In Meiji Jingu's Outer Gardens (on the other side of Sendagaya from the shrine) is another grand building devoted to the emperor: the Meiji Kaigakan, or Memorial Picture Gallery. It's surrounded by parking lots and sports stadiums rather than trees. On a recent weekday, it had about one visitor per hour. 

In this odd art mausoleum, there's no forgetting Meiji, one of Japan's most influential emperors. Eighty paintings on permanent display illustrate significant moments in his life, tracking Japan's swift evolution from pre-modern isolation to international dominance. 

Entrance hall of Meiji Kaigakan

The Kaigakan is the visual bookmark at the far end of a famous allee of ginkgo trees just off Aoyama Dori. Like a train station in a medium-sized eastern European city, the granite-faced building is blocky, neoclassical and vaguely Stalinist. Designed by Masatsu Kobayashi and completed in 1926, it's basically a high, narrow hall. A domed, two-story central entrance with gray and pink Japanese marble walls and tall stained-glass windows divides the building into east and west wings. The interior is shaped like a capital "I," with long straight galleries ending in perpendicular rooms. They feel like oversized, pre-war train cars outfitted for an exclusive club. Skylights run the length of the curved white ceilings and filter sunlight into the dark wood and glass walls separating visitors from the work. 

The paintings were made between 1926 and 1936, each by a different well-known artist of the day. Large and nearly square (all are 2.7x3m), they line the hallways like the well-ordered footmen and soldiers reproduced on many of their surfaces. The 40 Nihonga paintings in the east wing start with the emperor's birth in 1852 and lead through his enthronement, past the surrender of Edo Castle and the Siege of Kumamoto and up to 1878. In the west wing, 40 Western-style oil paintings follow Meiji from 1879 through the promulgation of the constitution, the Battle of Pyongyang (among others), and past peace treaties to his death in 1912. 

Bilingual panels detail the dates and places in each monumental snapshot. The Empress Viewing Rice Planting, for example, took place at the paddies on the grounds of the Aoyama Temporary Palace on June 18, 1875. 

Interior of the museum galleries with paintings on either side 

Art historians could trace endless threads through most of the paintings: The Empress wears kimonos in most of the Nihonga, then switches to bustled dresses and hats; the Emperor wears a military uniform from the age of 20. But most will find the artwork a snore—too many old men standing around tables. 

As a distinctive Japanese Gesamtkunstwerk, however, the Kaigakan is unique. Its structure and contents echo Meiji-period tensions between Japan and the West, between feudalist tradition and industrialized modernity, between nationhood and empire (and to strain a Christian analogy, if Meiji Shrine is a church and altar, the Kaigakan is a chapel hung with stations of the cross). Plus, visitors can soak up the myth-making—and its maintenance—in a peaceful, old-world luxury rare in Tokyo museums. 

Then there's the stuffed horse. When Meiji's beloved Kinkazan died at the age of 27, the emperor stuffed him. He's in the glass case at the back of the entrance hall.

The Meiji Kaigakan (Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery) is in the Meiji Jingu Outer Garden, Kasumigaoka, Shinjuku (between Shinanomachi and Gaienmae), Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.