Museum of Art, Atami Japan

1 min

The MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Japan, has some of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen, including paintings, scrolls, sculptures, porcelain and lacquerwork from China and Japan. Highly recommended!

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At the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Japan, I'm viewing the sculpture, Prince Shotoku at the Age of Two, carved in 1320 by the great Buddhist sculptor Koshun.
I'm holding - carefully! - a tea bowl of the type known as Hagi ware, a variety of Japanese pottery characterized by its organic, slightly imperfect shape and translucent white glaze. This is at the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Japan.
I was allowed to enter this extraordinary reproduction of the Golden Tea Room. A portable structure, it was used by Toyotomi Hideyoshi to host tea ceremonies throughout the land, in his efforts to unify pre-modern Japan.
A wide view of the tea room. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) is famed as one of the unifiers of pre-modern Japan, and created this portable room so that he could take part in a formal tea ceremony wherever he went. So in a real sense, the nation of Japan was created through the tea ceremony.