Ueno Park - Cultural Facilities

Cultural Facilities

Ueno Park is home to a number of museums. The very words in Japanese for museum as well as for art were coined in the Meiji period (from 1868) to capture Western concepts after the Iwakura Mission and other early visits to North America and Europe. The Tokyo National Museum was founded in 1872 after the first exhibition by the Museum Department of the new Ministry of Education. In the same year the Ministry of Education Museum opened, now the National Museum of Nature and Science.

The National Museum of Western Art was founded in 1959 based on the collection of Matsukata Kōjirō, returned by the French government after the Treaty of San Francisco. The building is by Le Corbusier who used it to express his concept of the Museum of Unlimited Growth, based on an expanding spiral. It has been nominated for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Other museums include the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, dating back to 1926, and Shitamachi Museum of 1980, which is dedicated to the culture of the "Low City". The park was also chosen as home for the Japan Academy (1879), Tokyo School of Fine Arts (1889), and Tokyo School of Music (1890). The first western-style concert hall in the country, the Sōgakudō Concert Hall of 1890 (ICP) was donated to the ward in 1983 and reconstructed on another site in the park, where it is used for concerts. The Tokyo Bunka Kaikan opened in 1961 as a venue for opera and ballet, in celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the city of Edo. The Imperial Library was established as the national library in 1872 and opened in Ueno Park in 1906; the National Diet Library opened in Chiyoda in 1948 and the building now houses the International Library of Children's Literature.