The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

The museum's depth is in the record of Japanese art's own encounter with modernity, from Meiji-era Nihonga through Taisho individualism, wartime art and its unresolved postwar loan status, and into 1960s materials-based experiment and postwar photography, with a smaller but real vein of Western modern painting, Cezanne and Gauguin among it, brought in as reference points for that story rather than as a competing survey of European modernism in its own right.

The museum that stands today at 3-1 Kitanomaru Koen is not its original building. It opened there in 1969, on land in Chiyoda ward close to the Imperial Palace, in a structure designed by the architect Taniguchi Yoshiro and funded by a donation from the industrialist Ishibashi Shojiro. Taniguchi's design, in steel-reinforced concrete over four floors above ground and one basement level, was conceived to sit at the meeting point of old Japan and the modern city around it: thick pilotis columns and undulating beams give the concrete exterior a rhythm the museum's own architecture page describes as distinctly Japanese in character rather than a plain import of postwar international style.

Thirty years on, in 2001 and 2002, the firm Sakakura Associates carried out a large-scale extension and earthquake-resistant renovation, reopening the museum in January 2002. The original atrium was removed in that work, but the museum has kept a room on the third floor, informally called the Room to Consider the Building, whose large windows preserve a view of Taniguchi's original design intent even where the safety upgrades changed the structure around it. Isamu Noguchi's sculpture Gate, installed outdoors at the 1969 opening, still stands as the building's most recognisable marker and its opening exhibition, Contemporary Art: Dialogue Between the East and West, set the terms the museum has worked from since.

The institution predates its building by seventeen years. It opened on 1 December 1952 in Kyobashi, in a former Nikkatsu Corporation building designed by the architect Maekawa Kunio, and it holds the distinction of being Japan's first national art museum. Through the 1950s and 1960s it built a reputation for exhibitions that ranged well beyond painting into photography, design and architecture, and it was that expanding programme, and an expanding collection, that outgrew the Kyobashi building and pushed the museum toward the move that gave it its present address.

A related institution, the Crafts Gallery, opened in 1977 in the former headquarters of the Imperial Guards, also inside Kitanomaru Park, and operated for over four decades as the museum's craft-focused branch. In 2020 it relocated out of Tokyo entirely, to Kanazawa in Ishikawa prefecture, where it reopened as the independent National Crafts Museum in two restored Meiji-period buildings. A reader planning a Tokyo visit should not expect to find it in the park any longer: the crafts collection now has its own address several hundred kilometres away, and the Kitanomaru building is the modern and contemporary art museum on its own.

The permanent holdings run to nearly 14,000 items spanning Japanese and Western-style painting, prints, sculpture, photography and video from the late nineteenth century to the present, of which about 200 works are on view at any one time across twelve or thirteen themed rooms on the fourth, third and second floors. The display rotates every two to three months, so a repeat visit is rarely a repeat of the same rooms. The fourth floor opens with a Highlights room, an introductory selection of prized works spanning roughly a century shown outside strict chronology, before moving into Meiji-era painting and crafts, Taisho-era individualism, a room devoted to Noh and Kabuki theatre imagery, and a room of interwar Surrealist and abstract work.

The third floor carries the collection through the Second World War and into the postwar decades: a room on Japanese art of 1941 to 1945, a room on two postwar women artists and their circle, a room built around unconventional 1960s materials and surfaces, and a room of staged photography made on the Tottori sand dunes. The second floor closes on contemporary painting, sculpture and photography from the 1990s onward. Eighteen items in the collection carry Important Cultural Property status, Japan's second-highest heritage designation for a movable object: twelve traditional Japanese paintings, five oil paintings and one sculpture.

Not every holding arrived by simple purchase or gift. Under the National Mobilization Law of 1938, Japanese artists were compelled into producing what the museum's own collection history calls War Record Paintings, battlefield and home-front works meant to document and support the war effort. When the war ended, the occupying Allied Powers requisitioned the 153 major surviving works in this genre and transferred them to the United States in 1951. It took until March 1970 for the two governments to agree on their return, and even then only as an indefinite loan from the American government to the Japanese one rather than a restitution or transfer of title. Those 153 paintings still sit in the museum's collection today, on that same loan status, and one room on the third floor is given over to Japanese art of the war years, the War Record Paintings among them.

The museum does not tuck this history away. Its own published material on the genre states plainly that the works are shown to illustrate how Japanese artists depicted the conflict and the Allied forces at the time, not to endorse the picture they present, and that some of what the paintings show reads as inappropriate by present-day standards. For a page whose job is the record rather than the promotion, this is the museum's most consequential holding: a body of work whose ownership status was itself a matter of two governments' negotiation for a quarter of a century, still displayed under the terms of an unresolved loan rather than a settled acquisition.

Readers planning a visit consistently come away satisfied with the collection itself and with the value it offers for a modest admission fee, an adult ticket to the collection galleries running to 500 yen. The fourth-floor rest area looking out over the Imperial Palace's Kitanomaru grounds, informally known among visitors as the room with a view, comes up often enough in reviews to count as a fixture of the visit rather than an incidental amenity, and the museum's English-language wall text and object labels are regularly credited with making an unfamiliar period of art history legible to a visitor who did not arrive already knowing it.

The recurring complaint runs the other way from what the museum's name promises. Visitors who arrive expecting a survey of current international contemporary practice instead meet a collection weighted toward Japanese art from the late nineteenth century onward, with the truly contemporary rooms confined to the second floor at the end of the route, and some find the room-by-room thematic curation hard to follow without close attention to the didactic panels. Neither complaint touches the quality of what is on the walls; both are about a museum whose English name, Museum of Modern Art, sets an expectation its Japanese remit was never built to match on its own terms.

Visitors consistently rate the collection itself very highly and single out the fourth-floor rest area's view over the Imperial Palace grounds; the most common complaint is that the museum reads as more historical and specialised than the word modern suggests, and that the room-by-room curation can be hard to follow without the wall text