Pola Museum of Art

High in the wooded hills of Hakone, south-west of Tokyo, the Pola Museum of Art is built to hide. To protect the surrounding beech forest, most of it sits below ground, lit through glass walls and a sunken courtyard, so you walk down into the collection with trees at eye level outside.

The art was one man's lifetime habit. Tsuneshi Suzuki, who ran the Pola cosmetics company, spent about forty years quietly buying European painting, and the museum that opened here in 2002 holds the result, one of Japan's largest gatherings of Impressionist and later art, with Monet's water lilies, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, shown beside Japanese painting and glass. A walk in the woods outside, past sculpture set among the trees, is meant to be part of the visit rather than an afterthought.