The Special Exhibitions
Various · Changing programme, several large exhibitions each year
The banners hanging around the plaza tell you what the museum is showing this season, and that is the real reason most people come. Two or three times a year the special exhibition galleries fill with loans from a great museum abroad or with a survey of a single artist, and the queues stretch across the esplanade. Vermeer, Botticelli, Klimt, Munch, the Egyptian treasures of the British Museum, the Impressionists of the Courtauld and the Mauritshuis, Van Gogh and Matisse have all had blockbuster shows here, alongside exhibitions of Japanese masters such as Ito Jakuchu and the Buddhist sculpture of the Nara temples.
The galleries were designed for exactly this. They are large, windowless and flexible, with high ceilings and controlled lighting, so that a curator can build a completely different set of rooms for each show. Tokyo audiences are famously attentive, moving slowly and reading every label, and the museum manages the flow with timed tickets and one way routes. Look for the introductory panels, which are usually excellent, and for the specially produced catalogues in the shop, which are often the most complete record of an exhibition anywhere.
The habit of touring foreign masterpieces to Ueno goes back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the museum and its neighbours brought the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the treasures of Tutankhamun to Japan for the first time and drew crowds in the millions. The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum has been one of the main venues of that tradition ever since, and its centenary year in 2026 is marked by a run of anniversary exhibitions. Whatever is on when you visit, you are taking part in one of the world's great exhibition cultures.
Did You Know? The Munch exhibition of 2018 to 2019 brought The Scream to Ueno and drew more than six hundred thousand visitors in three months.
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