It’s five o’clock on a November evening, and I’m leaning over a balcony watching a pipe band parading in the concourse below. But it’s not the chill of a Scottish autumn I’m feeling, rather the mildness of autumn in Japan — and the pipers are not Scots, but Japanese members of the Tokyo Piping Society welcoming a touring exhibition of French and Scottish 19th-century paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland to the Bunkamura Museum in downtown Shibuya.
If you think London is multicultural, you should try Tokyo — the main difference being that, whereas we British rely on others for our multi-culture, the Japanese are happy to do it for themselves. Having made up their minds in 1868 to admit Western culture, they have embraced it in all its manifestations, from Starbucks and McDo’s to Scottish pipe bands and the Mississippi paddle steamer plying the waters of Lake Ashi beneath Mt Fuji. Nowhere is the mix more thorough than in the arts. On consecutive nights of a recent five-day visit I took in an interactive exhibition of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester at the Mori Museum and a recital by the classical pianist Yoko Tokue on one of two supersonic pianos created by the German car designer Luigi Colani (the other one belongs to Eddie Murphy), combining music by Gluck and Gershwin.
Whether Western or Eastern, the Japanese take their art seriously and turn out in enviable numbers for exhibitions. The Codex Leicester, loaned to the Mori by Bill Gates, attracted 7,000 visitors a day, a total beaten by the 10,000 daily visitors to the Hokusai exhibition at Tokyo National Museum — attendance figures to turn the number-crunchers at the DCMS green. For visitors, of course, this has its downside.
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