Pictures of Japan

Tanaka Honke Museum Garden

The huge estate of a politically powerful and wealthy Japanese family has been largely turned into a museum. The storage vaults (many built into outdoor walls) are apparently full of all sorts of antique items, many not even catalogued yet. The museum features the expensive clothing, art, earthenware items, and even toys and children's books (such as from the turn of the 19th to 20th century) used by the Tanaka family throughout the years. Since photography is forbidden inside the museum, only the grounds are shown here.

At the time I went, the museum was doing a show based on obi, the belt-like cloth wraps that go around the waist of a kimono. Many painstakingly woven or dyed examples of obi and other clothing were displayed, along with the old black-and-white photos of the family wearing some of the items.

Cemetery(?) building near Tanaka Honke.	Same building.
Tanaka manor garden.	Very old-style door lock on a storage room built into an outdoor wall.	Beautiful autumn maple leaves (very small) litter a path alongside the big storage walls.
Gardens.	More gardens.	Yet more gardens. (The pond had some large koi, too!)	A small garden path.
A nearly perfect chrysanthemum flower.	A chysanthemum plant painstakingly set up to encourage show-perfect blooms.	A close-up of the moss and plants in a garden boulder scene.

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