Matsunaga Memorial Hall, Art museum in Odawara, Japan
The Matsunaga Memorial Hall is an art museum in Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, housed in a reinforced-concrete and partly wooden-tiled two-story main building. It opened in 1980 as a branch of the Odawara City Local Culture Museum. The grounds include a garden with stone monuments from the Nara and Heian periods and several tea houses.
Yasuzaemon Matsunaga, a businessman and tea master, founded the Matsunaga Memorial Hall foundation on 25 February 1959 to display his collection of antique art. After his death in 1971, the foundation dissolved in 1979 and most of the collection went to the Fukuoka City Museum. Odawara City received the land and buildings and opened the hall on 1 October 1980 as a branch of the Odawara City Local Culture Museum.
Locals often call the hall simply "Matsunaga-san". Its displays gather relics of the three modern Odawara tea masters: Masuda Takashi (Donno), Nozaki Hirota (Gen'an) and Matsunaga Yasuzaemon (Jian), alongside a collection linked to writer Nakagawa Yoichi, who spent his later years in Itabashi.
The museum is in Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, at 941-1 Itabashi, not in Tokyo. It opens daily from 9:00 to 17:00 and closes from December 28 to January 3. Admission is free, and the city of Odawara runs it directly.
The garden holds stone pieces from Nara and Heian temples, among them the Harima Kokubun-ji pagoda foundation stone, a five-storey stone pagoda and stone bridge from Chogaku-ji, and a stone lotus pond from Todai-ji. The garden was chosen for Japan's 100 Historic Parks list.
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