The Honkan
Watanabe Jin (1887 to 1973) · Completed 1937, opened 1938
The first thing you see through the main gate is the Honkan, a long, solid building of pale stone with a sweeping green tiled roof and a formal staircase leading up to its doors. It looks at once like a Western museum and like a Japanese castle, and that was the intention. It was designed by Watanabe Jin, who won a competition in 1931 with a proposal in what became known as the Imperial Crown style, a modern concrete frame wearing a traditional Japanese roof. Inside, a grand marble staircase rises beneath a coffered ceiling and stained glass, leading to the galleries on the upper floor.
The building replaced an earlier brick museum by the British architect Josiah Conder that was wrecked in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. The competition rules required a design in an Oriental style, and Watanabe answered with a symmetrical body, bronze fittings and a roof whose curved eaves recall temple architecture, all carried on a fireproof reinforced concrete frame. Look at the entrance hall for the mix of materials: Japanese marble, lacquer red doors and Western style balustrades. The exhibition rooms were among the first in Japan to be built with controlled lighting for fragile paintings.
The Honkan opened to the public in November 1938 as the Imperial Household Museum and became the core of the renamed National Museum after the war. It was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2001, so the building is itself a listed object in its own collection. Its plan of twenty rooms around a central stair is easy to follow, and the terrace at the top of the outer steps gives a good view back over the courtyard, the fountain and the Ueno trees, especially in cherry blossom season.
Did You Know? The building is an Important Cultural Property in its own right, so the museum's largest exhibit is the one you walk through.
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