Kurashiki

 After a night in rural Japan, our party, including me and the Kohmotos, set out for Kurashiki, a major tourist destination near Okayama. This little town is 16 km west of Okayama and, in a sense, a suburb of that city (population of the prefecture is about 450,000). Now, Okayama was bombed heavily in the second world , though it didn't receive the extreme treatment of Hiroshima 140km away. Kurashiki came away unscathed and the reason for that unfolded during my visit. Basically, General McArthur told his forces not to touch Kurashiki for much the same set of reasons that Rome, Paris, Prague, Venice and places of that ilk were spared.

The place to head to is the Bikan area which is a remnant of old Japan stuffed with museums, canals, little alleys with craftsmen's workshops, old factories converted to recreational use, and some nice homes. I cannot do justice to this landscape here, but a few pictures may well help. I got the impression that I was looking at something similar to the pioneering new towns built by British industrialists in the 19th century - New Lanark, Bourneville, and Port Sunlight came to mind.

The first picture shows one of the many alleys, and the second a walkway along one of the canal embankments. Both were restful and serene. The third picture shows the now four Kohmotos looking at one of the pleasant residences not far from the canals like the ones shown in the fourth and fifth pictures. Note the carp in the foreground of both of these pictures. The canals were swarming with fish, which no doubt attracted the bird shown in the sixth


picture.There were also some interesting modes of transport like the punt in the next picture and the rickshaw in the last one, both designed to trap the tourist dollar.

After a quick lunch, we headed to the one great attraction of the Bikan / Kurashiki area, and the one that no doubt exercised McArthur's mind more that the rest put together. That's the Ohara museum of art. That's also Ohara and not O'Hara! Alas, I cannot show you any pictures of the museum's interior. However, you might be stunned to learn that this smallish gallery in a small town perched on the edge of Asia  housed paintings by the likes of (in alphabetical order):
Aman-Jean, Bourdelle, Cezanne, Claus, Corot, Cottet, Courbet, Degas, Denis, El Greco, Frederic, Gauguin, Guerin, Laermans, Manet, Millet, Modigliani, Monet, Moreau, Pissarro, and Le Sidaner. These artists are mainly end 19 and early 20th century impressionists (El Greco excepted), but there were also works by Paul Klee Jackson Pollock and other modernists. See:
http://www.ohara.or.jp/200707/eng/.

How did this constellation of paintings find a home in western Japan. Basically, a local art lover and industrialist funded one of Japan's leading artists in the western mode to go to Europe with a cheque-book. To round up up art-works that seemed bridge the gap between European and Japanese traditions.

There's not more I can say. If you go the gallery's web page you may be able to download some of the pictures. The gallery also attracted a young audience with art-related competitions and something I considered delightful. One painting had a man swinging an axe. So, the gallery painted a similar

background to the picture's on a wall and then invited kids to pick up a mock axe and try to simulate the picture hanging in front of them. Cameras were working over-time as kids took it in turns to simulate the art.

AS