PRISON BY NIGHT: Light & Echoes

"PRISON BY NIGHT: Light & Echoes" is the first night opening of the Nara Prison Museum, held over the winter in the former Nara Prison, an Important Cultural Property in the city of Nara. The prison was completed in 1908, and it is the only one of the five great prisons planned by the Meiji government that survives complete. For the night opening its red-brick buildings are lit after dark, and light, film and sound are set into the preserved cell block and an outdoor square. The theme is that at night, the prison begins to speak.

The cell block is a corridor about 60 m long, lined with 48 single cells. White birds are projected flying up into a deep blue sky across its ceiling. Circles of soft yellow light and bright red geometric shapes play over the heavy cell doors and walls, and faint sounds echo down the corridor. The work is by the museum's art director, the designer Taku Sato, together with Seiichi Hishikawa, an artist who makes moving-image pieces drawn from Japanese crafts.

Since it opened, the museum has asked visitors to write their thoughts and questions on postcards and post them in its last room, the Musubi no Heya. More than 5,000 have been sent. For the night opening, some of these words are projected as letters of light onto the brick walls around an outdoor square, the Musubi no Hiroba.

The museum café adds a zenzai hot chocolate for the run. It combines cocoa with zenzai, a sweet soup of red beans, which was a popular winter dish when the building served as Nara Juvenile Prison. It is topped with cream and a cookie bearing the museum's mark.