Horrible weather today; cold, windy and lots of chubby rain. Instead of going to some temple as me and the Eri had planned, we decided to go to the Hokusai exhibition at the Edo Tokyo Museum. The exhibition centres on the relationship between the famous painter (probably responsible for the modern Japanese fetish of tentacle sex) and the German physician, Philipp Franz von Siebold, who was the resident doctor on the Dutch colony on the artificial island of Deshima, off the coast of Nagasaki, at the time, the only place where foreigners were allowed in Japan, during its closed-country period. Though the story of how their relationship seems rather unclear, von Siebold came into possession of some of Hokusai's paintings, which formed the basis of the exhibition, although many of Hokusai's most famous paintings were also included, like The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, and Red Fuji, both from his series of the 36 Views of Mount Fuji. The thing that was most interesting for me about these, and indeed all the most famous of his paintings, was how small they were. Having seen massive enlargements of thee paintings as posters in Athena and on TV, and having seen so many western paintings in galleries, I was expecting these to be of a similar size. It was a little strange to find out that both are really quite tiny, less than an A4 sheet of paper. The fact that they are so small makes the level of detail all the more impressive. One thing that did somewhat ruin some of them was that the ones that were owned by the national museum in France had massive "Owned By The National Museum of France" stamps all over them. What kind of idiot would put a bloody massive red stamp in the middle of a masterpiece? A mustachioed, beret-wearing, onion-selling one apparently. There were a lot of other really beautiful paintings that were less famous but no less impressive. I particularly liked the painting of Ama, (female divers), which looks like something from a nightmare, and Eri was a big fan of his 53 Stations of Tokaido, as there was (a little unbelievably) a Famicon (NES) game of it that she played as a kid - I think that that's probably the best reason I've ever heard for the appreciation of the works of a great master!
