Day 3 - Friday October 27, 2017 - Tokugawa Art Museum
Tokugawa Art Museum
Posted on Friday October 27, 2017
Today we’re going to the Tokugawa Art Museum and its associated Tokugawaen garden.
A must for anyone interested in Japanese culture and history, this museum has a collection of over 10,000 pieces that includes National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties once belonging to the (Tokugawa) shogun family. A priceless 12th-century scroll depicting The Tale of Genji is usually locked away, except during a short stint in late November; the rest of the year, visitors must remain content with a video.
This delightful Japanese garden adjacent to the Tokugawa Art Museum was donated by the Tokugawa family to Nagoya city in 1931, but destroyed by bombing in 1945. From that time until a three-year restoration project was completed in 2004, the site was used as a park. Water is its key element – there’s a lake, river, bridges and waterfall. Each spring 2000 peonies and irises burst into bloom, and maples ignite in the autumn.
Nagoya has several subway lines (compared with Kyoto, which only has two) but we’ve concluded that, as often as not, in Nagoya they don’t really go where you want to go or, at best, they only get you to within a 15 minute walk of where you want to go. In addition, the various lines don’t seem to be interconnected very well – normally you don’t mind going a couple of stops in the wrong direction if it allows you to connect to the line that gets you where you want to go but even that doesn’t really seem to work very well. On balance, the subway system seems “usable” if not particularly “useful”. Yesterday we walked to the Noritake Gardens and then walked from there to Nagoya Castle. Today, the closest subway station to Tokugawa is on a line that doesn’t connect at all to any of the other lines so it would require a walk to the nearest subway station, two changes and then a short walk to get to the start of the subway line that gets us there (or rather, within a 15 minute walk of Tokugawa). Much easier to walk over to Nagoya station and take the train. The nearest station to Tokugawa is Ozone (that’s “Oz-o-ney” not “O-zone”, or so I thought ….) and it’s still a 15 minute walk to Tokugawa but a lot easier than the subway. We keep trying to listen to the Japanese train announcements to discern how they pronounce the names – invariably, in the English announcements they tend to westernise the pronunciation so we listen intently to the Japanese announcements in the hope that we’ll recognise the Japanese place name when they say it. [Addendum: In Japanese, Ozone is オゾン which, translating the katakana, is “o - zo - n”. When we were with ET in Nagoya in 2019, re-tracing this visit, we rushed to catch the train. A station attendant was standing at the end of the platform, so as we rushed to catch what we hoped was the correct train, I said “Ozone?” He looked at me with a quizzical look on his face (about the equivalent of “huh?”). Fortunately, ET was right behind me and promptly corrected my mangled pronunciation, resulting in an enthusiastic response. Those last two syllables tend to run together so it sounds much closer to “oh-zon”] Although the train line to Ozone goes in a bit of a loop, it only takes 12 minutes and there seems to be a train about every 10 minutes (albeit all going to places further afield) so much easier to just do that rather than the subway.
Train travel in Japan is excellent. It’s not always cheap (particularly the shinkansen) but it’s amazingly efficient – it just works. Fares are ‘fixed’ in that they’re the same whether you buy 1 month, 1 week, or 1 day in advance (or on the spot). If reservations are required, the fare is in two parts – the ‘fare’ and a ‘seat fee’ (which can be as much as the fare). Figuring out the train times is easy – the superb Hyperdia application takes care of that. Just select the origin and destination, the date and time and it will give you a list of trains, including the fare (and seat fee, if there is one) and a ‘train timetable’ (showing all the intermediate stops and arrival and departure times) and an ‘interval timetable’ (showing all the trains on the route for the day). You can filter by train type – JR (Japan Rail) and/or Private (Japan has quite a few non-JR rail companies), include/exclude the shinkansen (including/ excluding the fastest Nozomi type, which can’t be used with a JR rail pass) and as often as not, it’ll show you the departure (and arrival) track number. Want to go from Nagoya to Ozone around 9.15 am? There’s a 9.16 from track 7, a 9.24 (track 11), a 9.31 (track 8), a 9.38 (track 7), a 9.46 (track 10) etc. The fare is ¥200 (free with a JR pass) and it takes 12 minutes. Simples!
We found our way to Tokugawa easily enough, entering via the Gardens and buying a combined Art Museum and Gardens ticket. A short walk through part of the Gardens to get to the Museum, with the reassurance that we could re-enter the Gardens again afterwards.
No photos allowed in the Art Museum unfortunately except for a couple of items in the entrance foyer. A great collection of 16th to mid 19th century items associated with the Tokugawa shogunate. Swords, armour, scrolls, exquisite kimonos, beautiful lacquerware, etc. etc. There was a prescribed ‘route’ so we just worked our way round, finding the cafe at the end of the route – time for a cake set (‘cake of the day’ + beverage).
We headed back into the Gardens for a longer walk round. Two couples having their (presumably wedding) photos taken. For us, one of the great attractions of Japan is the gardens. Tokugawaen is what would be classified as a ’stroll’ garden (versus say a Zen rock garden). There is something sublime about these gardens – plonk me down in a comfy chair and come back and get me in an hour.
We exited from the Gardens a different way from where we had originally come in and headed for a subway station on the ‘line that doesn’t connect to any other line’, as taking that line would get us more-or-less where we wanted to go next (the International Design Centre). We zig-zagged our way to the subway station, taking the side streets where possible, which are usually more interesting than the main roads.
We took the subway to the end of the line at Sakaemachi, close to – but not connected to – the subway at Sakae. We could have taken that line the one stop to Yabo-cho but decided it was just easier to walk. This is more of a retail/fashion/nightlife area; we strolled south, passing the Apple store and finding a Starbucks, so time for a coffee. Although we wouldn’t be caught dead in a Starbucks in Melbourne, they have their uses when elsewhere – a double espresso and a frozen matcha are usually reasonably reliable. This time, the frozen matcha was indeed cold – I had some and it felt like my brain was freezing. There was a Yashinoya next door, so we headed in there for lunch – simple and tasty and at ¥1,230 for the two of us, pretty cheap.
Lunch over, we headed to the International Design Centre – which was a complete bust. We wandered around and up and down, includng the ‘Design Centre’ on the 7th floor but that just seemed to be a bunch of offices – a couple of corridors with lots of closed doors and nobody around. We gave up trying to find the ‘designs’ – a disappointment as we were expecting something like the Danish Design Museum in Copenhagen, which we visited earlier this year and which was excellent.
We headed for the subway station – another 20 minute hike – to head home for a siesta. Later on, we walked back over to the Station to get a reservation for tomorrow on a shinkansen to Kyoto. Doing that at 6 pm on a Friday evening is not perhaps the best time but after a short wait in line, it was done easily enough – Hikari 465 at 11.09, car 12, seats 6DE.
We walked across the street to Midland Square, the tallest building in Nagoya, built in 2007 and, amongst other things, the headquarters of Toyota. We were really just looking for somewhere to have a beer; a dozen or more places on the fourth floor but they were all restaurants (and not overly cheap ones at that). We headed back out and ended up at a craft beer place on the corner near the hotel. Eschewing the craft beers, we each had a couple of glasses of (chilled) Cote du Rhone and a shared snack, which kept us going. Neither of us were particularly hungry after that, so we stopped by the 7-Eleven to get some supplies and then headed for home.
A-M always keeps an eye out for manhole covers in the street. In Japan, they tend to be works of art – a few examples included below from our travels yesterday.
The other thing noticeable in Japan are the vending machines – they are everywhere. Always useful when you’re out walking and you need a drink. As this article suggests, you never know where you’re going to find them but there’s usually one (or more) close by.