島根 September — Garden and Museum

That’s the Adachi Museum of Art, and especially its associated garden which has been voted (by an authoritative-sounding gardening magazine) the best in Japan for a half-dozen years now. Our road trip stopped there, alas for only an hour, and I took pictures.

But not of the museum; that’s strictly off-limits. If you have any sort of affection for Japanese art, you might want to page through its Web site’s “Collection” page, although the online images are mean-spiritedly small.

This is particularly true of the big featured image, “Autumn Leaves”, only on display in that season, which is painted on six large screens, enough to fill most of a wall in a really big room with astounding scarlet and blue.

I liked a lot of the pictures, although thought it was almost all very traditional, nothing really surprising or challenging. In particular I liked the use of neon-vivid splashes of color in otherwise-near-monochrome works.

Now, the garden... you can’t walk in it, except the teahouse bit. But you can take pictures.

I’d have loved to go for a stroll, stretch out for a bit on one of the soft-looking round green bits. But then I would have got in a bunch of other folks’ pictures.

It’s an awfully nice place to visit, and there are two or three very decent-looking places to sit and eat with a garden view; but we were in too much of a hurry.

There’s also a charming statue of Mr. Adachi, the industrialist who funded the place, in a ironically-businesslike pose, pointing fiercely off in one direction while looking in another. Suited, bald, bespectacled, a little portly, I got the feeling he would have been good company.

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