A collection hung on the walls, and a garden hung in the windows.
Adachi Zenkō hauled charcoal at fourteen, made his money in textiles, and opened this museum in 1970 at the age of seventy-one, in the town he came from. He held that gardens are also paintings, and he went on shaping this one until he died in 1990, at ninety-one. I have not been. What follows is read, not stood in — but the founding idea is unusual enough that I want to record it before I go, so that I can be caught out later if it turns out to be nonsense.
The premise is that the garden is an exhibit and is treated as one. It is not a single garden but seven of them — dry landscape, moss, white gravel and pine, a pond, a fifteen-metre waterfall cut into the hill behind after Taikan's Nachi Falls — and the building is arranged so that certain windows crop it. One opening is called the living framed painting, another the living hanging scroll, and the joke, if it is a joke, is that neither has ever needed rehanging. From what I can gather, you do not walk in it. You are given the view the founder decided on and nothing else, which is either the most controlled act of curatorship I have read about or a very expensive way of keeping people off the moss.
Indoors there is the largest private holding of Yokoyama Taikan in Japan, ceramics by Kitaōji Rosanjin, and — this is the detail that decided me — a collection of children's paintings, kept by a man who owned an Autumn Leaves. The hangings rotate by season, so what is on the walls in November is not what is on them in June. Check the site before you commit a day to it; the seasons move and the exhibition list moves with them.
If a garden is genuinely a painting, then the only honest thing to do is frame it and forbid the visitor to walk through the picture. I want to know whether that feels like rigour or like a rope.