Hakutsuru Fine Art Museum, Art museum in Sumiyoshi Yamate, Japan
The Hakutsuru Fine Art Museum is an art museum in the Sumiyoshi Yamate neighborhood of Kobe, holding a collection of Asian bronzes, ceramics, mirrors, jewelry, manuscripts, and traditional Japanese paintings. The building is a registered tangible cultural property of Japan, set on a hillside in a quiet residential area.
Kanō Jihei (1862–1951), seventh head of the Hakutsuru sake-brewing family, began collecting art in the 1890s and founded the museum foundation in 1931 to mark his 70th year. The main building opened to the public in 1934, making it one of Japan's few museums with pre-war origins. He was born into a family at Nara's Kōfuku-ji that dealt in antiquities and was adopted into the Kanō house.
The name Hakutsuru, white crane, comes from the sake brewery founded by the Kanō family; the crane stands for longevity in Japanese tradition. Kanō Jihei, seventh head of the house and a tea master known as Kakurō, gathered the works himself. The museum keeps a tea house, the Sōan, built in 1929, among its registered buildings.
The museum sits on a hillside in a residential neighborhood and is reachable by bus from nearby train stations. The collection is shown in rotating exhibitions, so it is worth checking in advance which works are on view before visiting.
The 1995 annexe, Japan's first carpet museum, displays about 130 Near Eastern carpets collected by Kanō Hideo, alongside African masks and sculptures. The main building's collection was also used in 1947, when some furnishings were borrowed to equip the lodgings of Emperor Shōwa during his postwar tour of Kobe.
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