A friend of mine, Mie, who I met at the wonderful Saraba bar in Jiyugaoka, works at the Setagaya Art Museum. The other day she told Lisa that they were having a fun exhibit at the museum. A guy who writes children’s books would do a reading, and then there would be a mini-parade complete with musicians walking down to the nearby Okusawa Temple. It sounded like a lot of fun, so Lisa, Kana, and I decided to check it out.
I had never been to the Setagaya Art Museum before, but have been meaning to go since I’m sure that my tax money supports the place. It is located in the middle of Kinuta Park, about twenty minutes worth of train and bus rides from where I live. I could probably get there in about the same time on a bike, if I had a nice comfortable big bike instead of the little small short-trip fold-able bike that I have now. Anyway, we all headed down there.
We probably would have enjoyed the walk through the park more if it wasn’t swelteringly hot and humid. August is a pretty tough month in Japan because just walking outside is enough to get you sweating like a demon. The museum is very nice; much larger than I anticipated, yet still small enough to have a local feel to it. When we headed in, we couldn’t find any information about the parade thing, which was slated to begin shortly. Actually, we thought about it for a bit, and figured that walking from here back to Okusawa would take like an hour, and in this crippling weather probably wouldn’t even be safe for the age group that was targeted. The lack of information about the event only confirmed our fears: we were at the wrong museum.
Going up to the information desk, we asked about it and indeed, we were in the wrong place. Mie told us that the thing was going on at “her museum” but did not make it clear that she meant the (perhaps ten minute walk from my home) Miyamoto Saburo Museum Annex. I’ve seen this place before: it is like someone’s regular house was taken over by a museum. It is also another place that I’m interested in going, but haven’t had the time or motivation to visit yet.
Since we came all this way for some culture, we decided to check out the Aoyama Jiro exhibit. Aoyama Jiro (any relation to the Aoyama Iichome subway stop?) was born in 1901 and pioneered collection of Chinese and Korean ceramics. It was interesting for me because my younger sister is a ceramicist herself, and also Jiro designed book covers, which were totally fascinating.
One thing that really threw me off about the book covers is that the characters were written from right-to-left. At first, I thought I just couldn’t read Japanese for some reason, then I thought “Oh, these are the masters and they are printed mirror-like for some sort of printing reasons”, but then a closer investigation revealed that the characters were not flipped, just written from right-to-left. I was really confused! I never knew that Japanese was written from right-to-left before exposure to the West. Based on the dates of the magazine covers and such, that form of writing was still going on as late at the 1950’s, although my friends all tell me that no, that only happened before the 30s or so. I don’t know; I checked the dates on the covers, and there were some there from the 60s even. I suspect it is just an art thing though, and that for the most part the country switched over to a left-to-right writing system earlier. Of course, it never shows up in computer text (man that would cause us computational linguists some trouble!) because computer systems originally were all imported from the West, didn’t handle Kanji originally, and by then people had probably switched over.
The exhibition was nice, I really enjoyed it. I’m planning to go back to the museum sometime. Also, we poked a lot of fun at Mie for not being more clear next time we ran into her at Saraba!
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