Thursday, May 20, 2010

National Archives and Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery 国立公文書館と聖徳記念絵画館


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This has turned out to be a very exciting week to begin my everyday blogging.
My day started out by meeting friends at Yokohama Station early this morning so we could head up to Tokyo for a joint Art History and History class field trip to the National Archives (above). The weather today was warm but rainy and windy, the kind of day when the train cars have foggy windows from all the humidity. Yuk. At the archive, I tried a variety of searches and came up with two documents that may be helpful for my current project. While I'm not sure how useful the documents will be, I spent the 120 yen (about $1.50 for 4 pages) to print out the digitized documents while I had the opportunity.
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While I was in Tokyo, I decided to split off from my classmates for the afternoon and visit the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (above and below). The gallery contains 80 large paintings illustrating the life of the Meiji Emperor. Half of the works are Nihonga, the other half Yoga. I spent about an hour and a half looking at the works, during which only a handful of older Japanese ladies came and went. Usually Japanese museums are very crowded, so it was a pleasant treat to have the galleries to myself. As a bonus, the museum also contained the skeleton and taxidermied remains of the Emperor Meiji's favorite horse! The gallery is located on the grounds of the Meiji Jingu Gaien, best known for it's sports complex. Below are some of the azaleas that are currently blooming all over Yokohama and Tokyo, the gallery is visible in the background.
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I headed back to home via Shinjuku, and stopped briefly to capture the rainwater pooling on a railing at Yokohama Station.
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