The story
Seijiro Matsuoka was a Tokyo property developer who collected for most of a very long life, and by the time he died in 1989 at 95 he had gathered around 2,400 works across an unusually wide sweep of the world. This museum in the quiet Shirokanedai district shows them.
Its three permanent galleries jump between civilizations. One is filled with ancient Egyptian sculpture and artifacts, another with stone Buddhas from Gandhara, the region of present-day Pakistan where Greek and Indian styles met to give the Buddha his first human face. A third holds his first love, Chinese ceramics, jades and bronzes.
Matsuoka opened the collection to the public in 1975 inside his own company building, then built this dedicated museum, which reopened in 2000, so the pieces could be seen in daylit rooms rather than an office lobby.
