Kannon, Tengu and Nio, Oh My!

Today we finally managed to make it to the Tokyo National Museum - yatta! Seeing how this was one of the major places that I had been wanting to go to I was rather glad to see that we were able to find a day to fit it in after our last attempt ending in failure. Things would be easier if buildings didn't decide to close on random days of the week.

As a whole the place can be summed up in one word - museummy. Sure, "museummy" may not be a word, but it's the best one I could come up with. Basically, if you love history, then this was great place to be. Thankfully I am one of those people, and I had a really great time.

Upon entering you are taking directly into a viewing of the history of Buddism and how it spread to Japan. There really wasn't much here that hadn't been see at other places throughout our trip with the exception the ability to see how the image of Buddah changed over time. Some of the works in Turkey were from the 1st century AD.

From there things slowly wound you around in a circle, giving you the chance to walk through the different stages of Japanese history, starting with the Jōmon period (1,600 years ago to 2,600 years ago). Through this early stage of the islands history we were able to see the oldest known pottery, and some pretty funky clay sculptures depicting everything from monkeys and cats to cactus looking looking people.

As things progressed things began to take on form of the more stereotypical Japan. Swords here. Kimonos there. Statues over there. Everything was beautiful, neat, and quite old. I would love to post pictures for today but we took around 300 of them, so I guess you'll have to ask me in person if you like to take a gander.