Twice in this city at the wrong time of year. That is the whole of my authority here.
Seikadō began in 1892 as a library. Iwasaki Yanosuke — Mitsubishi's second president, and the younger brother of the man who founded it — built it to hold books, and his son Koyata, the fourth president, went on buying for the next fifty years and moved the whole thing to Setagaya in 1924. What sits behind the name now is roughly two hundred thousand classical volumes and some six and a half thousand objects of East Asian art, seven of them National Treasures and eighty-four Important Cultural Properties. It is not a house museum in the sense I usually mean. It is a family's reading and a family's looking, kept together, which is rarer and in some ways harder.
The object I want is the yōhen tenmoku known as the Inaba Tenmoku: a black-glazed Chinese tea bowl whose interior is scattered with spots ringed in blue iridescence. Three complete examples are known to survive, all three designated National Treasures — one at Ryōkō-in in Kyoto, one at the Fujita in Osaka, and this one. It carries the Inaba name because the Inaba family kept it for generations; it came to the Iwasakis in 1934, and Koyata is reported to have refused to drink from it, on the grounds that a treasure of the country must not be put to private use. I have read that sentence perhaps a dozen times and I still cannot decide whether it is the most admirable or the most melancholy thing a collector has ever said about an object he owned.
Since October 2022 the galleries have been on the ground floor of the Meiji Seimei Kan, on the edge of the Palace moat — a 1934 building by Okada Shin'ichirō, Corinthian and monumental, and the first Shōwa-era building to be made an Important Cultural Property. So the intention is a European temple front in Marunouchi with a Song dynasty tea bowl inside it, which is either a wonderful collision or a category error, and I would rather see it than argue about it in advance. My difficulty has only ever been the calendar: the bowl is not permanently out, the exhibitions rotate, and I have twice been in this city in the wrong season and not thought to check. I intend to write ahead, next time, before I book anything at all.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.