Kyoto National Museum

The Kyoto National Museum opened in 1897 at the foot of Higashiyama, across the road from Sanjusangen-do, to protect the cultural property handed down in Kyoto. That is still its core: besides its own collection of more than 9,000 works, it looks after thousands of pieces deposited by temples and shrines, many of them National Treasures. The red-brick Meiji Kotokan by Katayama Tokuma, an Important Cultural Property, is what you see from the gate, but it holds no exhibitions while plans for seismic retrofitting go ahead. Everything is shown in the Heisei Chishinkan, a long, quiet building by Taniguchi Yoshio that opened in 2014. Most of the year its rooms hold the Masterpiece Gallery, the collection show, split by medium: ceramics, archaeology, painting, calligraphy, crafts and sculpture, for 700 yen. Paintings and calligraphy change almost every month, crafts every six weeks or so and ceramics, archaeology and sculpture about every three months, because silk and paper fade, so a second visit is rarely the same. The rooms are kept dim for the same reason. Several times a year a special exhibition takes over the whole building at a higher price, and before and after each one only the garden, with Rodin's Thinker, is open. Check the calendar before you go.