The Journal of Japanese Gardening has ranked the Adachi Museum of Art’s Japanese gardens number one in its “Japanese Garden Rankings” for eleven consecutive years. Visit this site and you’ll see why. The homepage features breathtaking photographs of the gardens in all four seasons, complete with waterfalls, beautiful stone work, and quaint tea houses tucked into manicured hill sides. Selecting The...

The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery presents this Web interactive on the life and work of the Japanese painter and printmaker, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), the creator of the woodblock print "The Great Wave", one of the most recognized images in the world. The Flash interactive consists of four main sections on Hokusai's art: Brush & Block, Color, Composition, and Subject, plus an introductory,...

The University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) has a collection of approximately 1,500 magic lantern slides in its Japan Collection, which it has digitized with the permission of the Japan Foundation. The magic lantern was the precursor to the modern slide projector, and was extremely popular in Europe and Asia in the 1800s, with people going from towns to villages doing public shows. The slides...

On this web site from the Library of Congress, over 200 modern Japanese prints, known as hanga, are on display. The prints were collected by the College Women’s Association of Japan (CWAJ) for a juried exhibition to celebrate the Association's 50th anniversary, and have been donated by the CWAJ to the Library of Congress. The prints in the show run the gamut from figural, such as "White Clover"...

Visitors to this site will see about 20 Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, selected from more than 100 currently on view at the Library of Congress (LC), that were in turn culled from over 2,000 in the Library's collection. Ukiyo-e is commonly translated as "pictures of the floating world." The art form began in the Japanese city Edo in the seventeenth century. The exhibition proceeds through six...

The Asia Society's Museum in New York City features an exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and large-scale installations by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Although the name may not be familiar to some visitors, his style may be, as his work is "readily associated" with Japanese manga comics and animation. The images of children, with their extremely wide set eyes and...