Looking out the window from the Sumida Hokusai Museum, the Tokyo Skytree was seen in the distance

Tokyo Skytree seen from Sumida Hokusai Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, probably the most famous Japanese painter in the world, was born in the late Edo period, but the Sumida Hokusai Museum opened here in Kamezawa, Sumida-ku, in 2016. It is 160 years after Hokusai's death.

It is a shame that there has not been a museum with Hokusai's works in the area for so long, but even more interesting is the fact that Sumida Ward, which runs the museum, did not originally own any Hokusai works. In fact, at the time the museum was being planned, Sumida Ward did not own any of Hokusai's works. I don't know if they had the resources to acquire them or not, but the plan was approved when there were no works in the collection. I guess the approval of the ward assembly is not a good thing.

Since then, the plan has progressed somehow, and the collection of Peter Morse, who was known worldwide as a collector of Katsushika Hokusai, was purchased, and the collection of Narazaki Muneshige, a leading researcher of Ukiyo-e, was bequeathed to the museum.

When I looked out the window of the museum, I could see Tokyo Skytree towering in the distance. If Hokusai had been alive today, he might have painted a work called "Thirty-six Views" with the Tokyo Skytree as the subject.

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