Museums Worth the Building

Some museums in Japan are worth visiting whatever is hanging inside, because the building is the work. Architects have used the museum brief to build their clearest statements, and several sit in places worth the trip on their own. Here are the ones to plan around for the architecture.

Shiga: the Miho Museum

The Miho Museum, in the hills near Koka, is approached on foot through a long tunnel and across a suspension bridge before the I.M. Pei building reveals itself, most of it buried in the mountain to satisfy a nature-reserve setting. The approach is engineered as a slow reveal, modeled on a Chinese tale of a hidden valley. Spring and autumn frame it best. Check the seasonal opening calendar; it does not open year-round.

Tokyo: the Nezu Museum

The Nezu Museum in Omotesando holds a private collection of East Asian art behind a Kengo Kuma building, entered along a bamboo-lined walk that drops the city away before you reach the galleries and garden. The garden, with its tea houses and ponds, is half the visit. It is a calm pause a block from one of Tokyo's busiest shopping streets.

Aomori: the Towada Art Center

The Towada Art Center, by Pritzker laureate Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, scatters white gallery boxes along a street, each holding one permanent commission, so the museum spills outdoors into the town. Yayoi Kusama's installation sits across the road. It turns the main street of Towada into the gallery.

Imabari: the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture

On Omishima in the Seto Inland Sea, the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture opened in 2011 as Japan's first museum of contemporary architecture, two structures, the Steel Hut and the relocated Silver Hut, both Ito's own work, on a promontory over the water. The building is the exhibit. It pairs with a Shimanami Kaido trip.

Gifu: the Mosaic Tile Museum, Tajimi

In Tajimi, a tile-making town, the Mosaic Tile Museum is a Terunobu Fujimori building that rises from the ground as a clay mound with trees sprouting from its crown. Inside, the collection traces a century of Japanese tile. The building alone justifies the detour into Gifu's ceramic valley.

Oita: the Prefectural Art Museum (OPAM)

The Oita Prefectural Art Museum, OPAM, opened in 2015 in a glass-and-timber building by Shigeru Ban, whose ground-floor facade folds open so the gallery meets the street. Ban is known for paper-tube structures and disaster-relief shelters; here he made a civic gallery feel like an extension of the city. It sits in central Oita near the station.

Planning a museum-architecture route

These reward pairing with their settings: Miho with a Shiga day and its season check, Nezu with an Omotesando walk, the Ito and Tajimi museums with Setouchi and Gifu trips. Architecture museums and their cafes sometimes keep different hours, and several close one weekday, so confirm before a long detour.