Taito City, Part 2: Ueno Park museums & massive lotus pond

Continued from the previous post, which ended with me having lunch from a FamilyMart convenience store just outside of Ueno Park.

From there I looped round the outside edge of the park until I got to the National Museum of Western Art, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of 'The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement', shared between several countries. After admiring copies of Rodin's The Thinker and Burghers of Calais and Bourdelle's Hercules the Archer in the open front courtyard, I headed inside.

The permanent collection was smaller than I'd expected so I was finished sooner than I had thought I would, but well worth a look round - not just due to the art, but also the museum architecture, though my photos don't do justice to the latter.

The majority of the collection consisted of French artists, with a focus on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

However, there were also pre-18th century works by artists such as Veronese, Rubens, Brueghel and many others...

Next to one of them - Mater Dolorosa, by Carlo Dolchi (1655) - was a display of samples of the colourants (as they put it) used in it, plus ones of reference colourants. For example, they had samples of lapiz lazuli and the natural ultramarine blue made from it, which was incredibly expensive and high quality at the time and is what was used in the painting, and samples of lower-grade equivalents, azurite and impure natural ultramarine.

There were also a few non-French 19th and early 20th century paintings (including Roses by Van Gogh and The Loving Cup by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and mid-20th century paintings by Picasso, Soutin, Dubuffet and more.

Collections of historic rings and framed medieval manuscript leaves rounded things off.

Since I had finished sooner than I'd expected, I realised on leaving that I had time for another museum in the park, plus a look at the lake. I took a slightly different route through the park this time, passing a statue of a famous samurai, Saigo Takamori, on the way.

The lake - officially known as Shinobazu-no-ike, or Shinobazu Pond - is huge, and I was astonished to see it completely covered in a carpet of lotus plants! I had thought the lotus pond at the big shrine in Kamakura was impressive, but this was even more so, as it really was massive - a sea of green leaves sticking out of the water, stretching into the distance. Apparently you can go on boat trips in this lake, but I'm not sure how - there didn't seem to be any room at all for even a narrow boat to fit on the water between all the lotus stalks.

Next to that end of the lake was the other museum I had my eye on; the main branch of the Shitamachi Museum. It was small but fascinating, demonstrating to the visitor what everyday life was like for the working-class residents of a tenement area in Tokyo in the Taisho era (1912-1926) and the Taito City area between the later 1860s and the 1960s. The latter included information about the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which was particularly devastating and destructive in this area of the city because of all the close-together wooden buildings and the fact that when the earthquake struck, it happened to be the exact moment when all the families were preparing their lunch over open flames; more people died from the fires the earthquake created than from the shaking itself.

There was also information about life in the area during WWII, especially during the bombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Other interesting sections on the 2nd floor included a display of children's toys and games, an original wooden attendant's booth from a local public bathhouse, and a reproduced living room of the mid-1950s to 1960s, complete with TV, dresser, radio, electric rice cooker and tiny cooking area.

Downstairs, on the first floor (what we in the UK would call the ground floor) there was a replica of a tiny tenement house shared by two families; a coppersmith's and a mother and daughter who owned a tiny 'children's shop' containing sweets, kites, toys, games and round or rectangular trading cards. In front of the house was a shared bin, well and stack of firewood and round the back was a shrine to the god Inari. The house was encircled by alleys containing a drainage channel, laundry poles and potted plants - the plants weren't just for decorative purposes, apparently, but also to make home remedies.

There was also a separate replica of the store of a manufacturer and wholesaler of sandal straps and Japanese wooden clogs. Although the houses are replicas, all the exhibits within them are original to the Taisho era.

It was 4 p.m. when I left the museum and went home via a train from Ueno Station and a change at Shinjuku.