Miho Museum

MIHO MUSEUM stands in the mountains at Shigaraki, in Koka, and opened in November 1997. It holds ancient art from Egypt, western Asia, Greece and Rome, south Asia and China alongside Japanese art, and the building that holds it was designed by I. M. Pei, the architect of the glass pyramid at the Louvre.

The approach

The museum is not entered directly. A path lined with weeping cherries leads to a curving tunnel, and the tunnel gives on to a suspension bridge over a valley. Only then does the entrance appear, under a roof in the irimoya form, the hip-and-gable roof of Japanese temples and farmhouses.

That sequence was built on a Chinese story. In The Peach Blossom Spring, written by Tao Yuanming, a fisherman follows a wood of flowering peach trees into a cave and comes out in a hidden country where everyone lives contentedly. The museum was laid out to be reached the same way.

The building

About eighty per cent of the building is buried in the hillside, because the site lies inside a protected zone of a prefectural natural park.

Inside, light falls through a glass roof onto walls of pale limestone, and the roof itself is carried on a space frame. The main hall opens onto a view of the hills, which is the effect Pei was after: he said he wanted people to understand that a building merged into nature was the result of very deliberate design.

The collection

The collection was begun by Koyama Mihoko, who founded the museum and gathered Japanese art over more than forty years: tea utensils, Shinto and Buddhist art, calligraphy and painting, ceramics and lacquer. It widened into the ancient art of the world as the museum took shape with Pei.

It now runs to about 3,000 works, of which between 250 and 500 are on show at any time. The south wing holds the ancient art of the world; the north wing is given to the special exhibition of the season.

Eating there

A restaurant sits in the reception building and a cafe in the museum building, and a free electric shuttle runs the five hundred metres between the two for anyone not walking it.