National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Listen for a moment before you go inside. Traffic hums along the elevated expressway nearby. Wind moves through the old trees of the park. Below the stone walls, the moat lies flat and green. This is the edge of the Imperial Palace grounds. Here, among the ruins of a samurai fortress, stands the museum that tells the story of Japanese art in the modern age.

You are at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Many people simply call it MOMAT. It opened in 1952, as Japan's first national museum of art. The timing matters. The country was rebuilding after the Second World War. The American occupation had just ended. A national museum for modern art was a statement. It said that Japan's recent past in painting, sculpture and design deserved serious attention, next to the temples and scrolls of older centuries.

Look at the ground around you. This area is called Kitanomaru, which means the northern enclosure. For more than two centuries, it was part of Edo Castle, the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns. The shoguns were the military rulers of Japan before the modern era. Their castle became the Imperial Palace after 1868, when the emperor moved his court to Tokyo. The great stone walls along the moat are survivors from that older world. The museum sits just outside them.

The building in front of you opened in 1969. It was designed by the architect Yoshiro Taniguchi. Notice the calm, horizontal lines and the restrained surfaces. The design does not compete with the park or the palace walls. Here is a detail most visitors miss. Taniguchi's son, Yoshio Taniguchi, also became an architect. He later redesigned the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So the two great modern art museums share a family name in their architecture.

Inside, the heart of the museum is its own permanent collection. It holds more than thirteen thousand works, made from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The selection on display changes regularly, so the walls you see today may differ from last season. The collection galleries usually run downward through the building, from the fourth floor to the second. Many visitors take the lift to the top and walk down. The story then unfolds roughly in time order, decade by decade.

The early rooms show a country in rapid change. In the late nineteenth century, Japan opened to the West after a long period of isolation. Young artists suddenly met oil paint, perspective and European academies. Some travelled to Paris to study. Others defended older Japanese techniques of ink, mineral pigments and silk. This tension runs through the whole museum. Western-style painting is called yoga. Japanese-style painting is called nihonga. You will see both, often hung side by side.

One quiet highlight is a painting by Ryusei Kishida, called Road Cut Through a Hill. He painted it in 1915. It shows a sloping road of bare earth, a stone wall and a pale sky. Nothing dramatic happens. And yet the clay seems almost to lift off the canvas. The Japanese government lists it as an Important Cultural Property. That is a high national honour, and it is unusual for a modern painting. If it is on view, give it a few slow minutes.

Another treasure is a long ink handscroll by Taikan Yokoyama, called The Wheel of Life. A handscroll is a painting on a horizontal roll, viewed section by section. This one stretches about forty metres. It follows a single drop of water. The drop becomes a stream, a river, a stormy sea, and finally a dragon rising into cloud. Because of its fragile materials, the scroll is shown only at certain times. If you find it unrolled, consider yourself lucky.

The museum also holds a difficult chapter of history. During the war, many artists were commissioned to paint battle scenes for the state. After the war, American forces took these paintings to the United States. In 1970, more than a hundred of them returned to Japan on indefinite loan, and they came here. Among their painters was Tsuguharu Foujita, famous in Paris for his delicate cats and nudes. The museum shows some of these works, carefully and with context.

Now find the room on the fourth floor with a wide window. The museum calls it the Room with a View. Here you can sit down and look out over the palace moat and the stone walls. On a clear day, the office towers of Marunouchi rise beyond the trees. It is a rare thing in a museum. Instead of more art, you get a pause, and the real city outside, framed like a painting.

The museum has changed shape over the years. For a long time, it ran a separate crafts gallery nearby, in a red brick building from the early twentieth century. In 2020, the crafts collection moved to a new national museum in Kanazawa, on the Sea of Japan coast. The film collection also became its own institution, the National Film Archive of Japan. What remains here is focused. It is the painting, sculpture, prints and photography of modern Japan.

Take a moment outside, too. In spring, the moat at Chidorigafuchi, a short walk away, turns pink with cherry blossoms. Boats drift slowly under the branches. In autumn, the trees of Kitanomaru Park turn gold and red. Office workers eat lunch on the benches. Joggers circle the palace, which is one of the most popular running routes in Tokyo. The museum is part of this daily rhythm, not separate from it.

So here you are, at the meeting point of two Japans. Behind you are the walls of the shoguns. In front of you is a building of glass, concrete and quiet lines. Inside, artists spent a century asking what it meant to be modern and Japanese at the same time. Their answers are still on the walls. Some are confident. Some are troubled. All of them are honest about the questions.

As you walk away, look once more at the moat. Watch the reflection of the stone walls shiver when the wind crosses the water. Listen for the traffic above, and the birds in the old trees below it. This mix of old stone and new city is the same mix the painters inside were trying to capture. You are standing in the middle of it now.