Muses

Our list of museum visits is truncated this time.  I guess because the culture is so different and the understandings take time to develop and we had so little time.  Nonetheless, here are 2 other museums of interest, although somewhat of Japanese modernity rather than tradition.  The Hakone Open-Air Museum was well out of Tokyo so a train trip through countryside and lovely mountainous terrain.  It was essentially European, but a very worthy collection of art of the era of Picasso and the like, with a big collection of fairly minor items from Picasso and a garden littered with European statuary by Henry Moore and Miro and Rodin and others.  It's one of many sculpture gardens in Japan.  The other was the Kyoto Railway Museum.  Again, a product of the West but applied and enhanced by Japan.  In fact, the Shinkansen were the first fast trains and changed the expectations of rail given it was expected at the time to be replaced by air transport.  Now Shinkansen are all over and dense Japanese cities are examples of effective use of public transport and the rest of the modern world (definitely Europe and China, not Australia or UK or US [AUKUS has other concerns!]) just dreams.

Megan and Eric visited the Hakone Open-Air Museum and the Kyoto Railway Museum.