The story
Ito Jakuchu, an 18th century painter from Kyoto, spent about ten years on a set of 30 hanging scrolls of birds, fish, insects and flowers, and gave them to the Zen temple Shokoku-ji. In 1889 the temple presented them to the imperial household. Today the scrolls, known as the Colorful Realm of Living Beings, are a national treasure, and they belong to the Museum of the Imperial Collections in the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
The museum began with a gift. After Emperor Showa died in 1989, the imperial family gave about 6,500 works of art to the state, and a museum to show them opened in 1993 on the grounds of the Sannomaru, the third enclosure of the shoguns' old Edo Castle. The collection has since grown to around 9,500 pieces. Its other national treasures include a great screen of Chinese lions attributed to Kano Eitoku, the leading painter of the 16th century warlords, and the illustrated scrolls of the Mongol invasions of Japan, made for a samurai who fought against them. Hokusai is here too, with a painting of a cut watermelon from 1839, when he was about 80.
For years the museum was a small building that could show only a handful of pieces at a time. In 2023 it passed from the Imperial Household Agency to the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, and a new building has been opening in stages, with copper roofs and diamond patterns on its walls that echo the palace, and about eight times the old exhibition space.
