Japanese Jellies: Tokyo National Museum

For the first day of Golden Week, I kept with my belief that Golden Week is the best time to go to Tokyo, and set off to Ueno.

It is best to go to Tokyo during Golden Week, but not if you want to go to Ueno zoo, where the new Pandas are housed. This is the entrance to the zoo, about 30 minutes after opening time.

Luckily, my plan for the day was to go to the Tokyo National Museum, just a bit further along the park. There was a queue at the entrance, but only of about 30 people, half of which already had tickets and were merely waiting for the gates to open.

The museum is a complex of 5 buildings, 3 of which are closed for renovations. I was a bit upset at that at first, but seeing as I managed to spend almost 6 hours there (from opening time to 20 minutes before closing time), I ended up being quite glad there wasn't more to see!

As opposed to the National History Museum, this one had quite a lot of information in English, and I learned an amazing amount of stuff! The least interesting part for me were the calligraphy rooms, but even there most of the scrolls have intricate drawings as a background to the text.

But from then on, the different exhibitions were absolutely fabulous. There were many rooms of japanese paintings and embroideries, of which I am a big fan. And a special exhibition on lacquerwork, and the influence of sakura in art.

And by far the most interesting for me was the archaeology building. The Japanese prehistoric cultures were amazing, and very different from what you can find in France!

The Jomon culture were Ice-Age folks who appear to be the first to make pottery vessels. [Visual image of an Ice-Age Japanese viking in a clay boat....].

And what makes it even more amazing, is that they were extremely good at making pottery pots, and got a bit over-enthousiastic in later years. What is odd, though, is that after a peak of beautiful pottery in what they call the Middle Jomon, the introduction of metalworking and better farming techniques from the mainland caused the pottery to get more simple again in the Late Jomon period.

Middle-Jomon extravaganza.

Vase from the Yoyoi age, between the late Jomon and Kofun eras.

Another amazing ancient people were the folks during the Kofun period. Folks had gotten things together quite a bit by then, and had different clans fighting each other, and had gotten into making burial mounds for their kings [probably after discovering that clay boats don't float well]. And on these burial mounds, they made huge numbers of clay figurines, of everything from houses to livestock to humans. Little is known about this period for sure, as all that are left are a few legends, so noone really knows what the clay figurines were for.