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The Directory › Asia › Japan › Kurashiki
Plate III · i · c · The City

Kurashiki

One entry: a Greek temple on a canal in Okayama, which has no business existing and is all the better for it.

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A willow-lined stone canal in a preserved merchant quarter at dusk, white storehouses with black lattice walls
Plate III · i · c · The Bikan quarter, at dusk

A merchant town that kept its warehouses and then put a European picture collection in the middle of them, quite seriously.

A day, properly arranged
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Late autumn, and I would not go in high summer.

The entries

One entry, visited, and it carries the town on its own.
A provincial gallery interior with stone colonnade and coffered ceiling, one wide framed painting in low raking light
Interior · the first room

You walk in braced for provincial politeness and are handed an El Greco within thirty seconds. I laughed, which is not what one is meant to do in the first room.

LATE AUTUMN, EARLY AFTERNOON
Notes for Kurashiki

It is a long way from anywhere and the trains are the price of admission. I went in late autumn, which I would repeat: the light on the canal is low by mid-afternoon and the day-trip coaches have gone by then.

Do not treat the annexes as filler. The craft wing — Hamada, Kawai, Leach — is the part I think about most, and it is the part everyone walks past on the way to the paintings. Give it a proper hour rather than the fifteen minutes it usually gets.

The town is small enough that the museum is the plan and everything else is what happens around it. That is an honest description, not a complaint; one very good building and a canal is a better day than four indifferent ones.

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