Japan Ukiyo-e Museum

The Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, on the western edge of Matsumoto, holds an almost unimaginable treasure: over 100,000 Japanese woodblock prints, paintings and illustrated books, regarded as the largest collection of ukiyo-e in the world. Built around the private holdings of the Sakai family, a Matsumoto merchant clan who spent five generations assembling the collection, it is a place of pilgrimage for anyone serious about Japanese art.

Ukiyo-e — "pictures of the floating world" — is the woodblock print tradition that flourished in Japan from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, capturing kabuki actors, courtesans, sumo wrestlers, ghost stories and, most famously, landscapes. The genre gave the world Hokusai's Great Wave and Hiroshige's travel scenes, and it profoundly influenced European Impressionism when prints reached the West. The Sakai collection spans the whole arc of the art form, including works by the great masters and a wealth of rarer prints that rarely surface elsewhere.

Because the holdings are so vast, only a fraction can be shown at any one time, so the museum rotates its exhibitions throughout the year around seasonal or thematic displays. This means repeat visits reveal different treasures, but it also means it is worth checking what is currently on show before making a special trip — you might catch a Hokusai landscape series on one visit and a display of actor portraits on the next. The museum also serves as a research center, preserving and studying the collection as well as exhibiting it.

The building itself is of architectural interest, a striking modern structure designed by the noted architect Kazuo Shinohara, its clean concrete forms a deliberate counterpoint to the traditional art within. Inside, an introductory video (in Japanese and English) explains ukiyo-e and the printmaking process, helping newcomers appreciate the extraordinary craft behind each image — the collaboration of artist, carver and printer, and the many separate blocks needed for a single multicolored print.

The museum sits a little apart from central Matsumoto, on the western side of the city near the Matsumoto Rekishi-no-Sato open-air architectural museum, so the two pair well for a half-day away from the castle crowds. It is about a ten-minute taxi or drive from JR Matsumoto Station, or reachable on foot from Oniwa Station on the Alpico Kamikochi line. Admission is 1,000 yen, and an hour is enough for most visitors to take in the current exhibition. For print enthusiasts, art historians, or simply travelers curious about one of Japan's greatest artistic exports, the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum offers a rare, deep encounter with the floating world — and the knowledge that behind the walls lie tens of thousands more images waiting their turn to be seen.