A collection that goes down as far as it goes up, and I have only ever walked past the door.
Hosomi Ryō was an Osaka industrialist, born in 1901, who bought Japanese art for most of his life and took the art name Kokoan; the name and the appetite both passed down in the family after his death in 1978, and the collection went on growing. It opened to the public in March 1998, in Okazaki, on the far side of the canal from the big civic museums. There are something like a thousand pieces and around thirty Important Cultural Properties among them, and — this is the part that keeps it on my list — the range is indecently wide for one family's eye: Heian and Kamakura Buddhist and Shinto work, Muromachi ink painting, Negoro lacquer and tea kettles, Momoyama ceramics and cloisonné, and then Edo painting, Rimpa, and Itō Jakuchū.
There is no permanent display. Four or five exhibitions a year, drawn from the holding, which means the museum is functionally a different building each season and no single visit can claim to have seen it. Ōe Tadasu's design — three floors above ground and two below, arranged around a sunken courtyard, and awarded the Building Contractors Society prize — is said to make you descend into the collection and then climb out of it. On the third floor there is a tea room called Kokoan, built in sukiya style by Nakamura Sotoji and named for the man who started all this, with the Higashiyama in the window. It is bookable in advance. I intend to book it.
My excuse for not having gone is the honest one: it is ten minutes from Murin-an and Nomura, and both times I have been in Okazaki I have spent the afternoon I meant to spend here sitting in a garden instead. That is not a defence. The correct plan is to give it a morning of its own — arrive at opening, take the building downward first, and go whichever season the Jakuchū is out, which is a thing worth ringing to ask. I will rewrite this page the week after I go, and until then everything above is read, not seen.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.