Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art

This opened in 1933 as the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, built in the teikan style that put a tiled Japanese roof on a Western masonry box – a compromise the 1930s liked and very little of which survives. It is the second-oldest public art museum building in Japan and the symmetry, the coffered hall and the heavy staircases are all original.

The 2020 reopening, by Aoki Jun and Nishizawa Tezzo, did something unusually restrained with it. Rather than punching a new entrance through the 1933 façade, they excavated the forecourt and slid a curved glass ribbon in below the original ground level, so you now enter underneath the old building and come up inside it. The historic elevation is untouched and the museum gained a modern foyer. It is the best piece of adaptive reuse in Kyoto.

At the back, the Higashiyama Cube is a new wing for large shows, and above it a roof terrace looks east over the Okazaki canal to the enormous vermilion torii of Heian-jingu and the hills behind. That terrace costs nothing.

The Collection Room draws on a municipal collection of some 3,900 works, overwhelmingly by artists of the Kyoto school – Takeuchi Seiho, Uemura Shoen, Tokuoka Shinsen and their circle – together with ceramics and modern crafts. It is rehung four times a year around a seasonal theme, so a spring visit and an autumn visit are genuinely different shows.

This is not a large or an exhausting display. Reckon on forty-five minutes. What it does well is give you Kyoto nihonga in Kyoto, in the building that was put up to hold it, which is a more coherent hour than the same paintings would be in Tokyo.

Special exhibitions in the Higashiyama Cube are ticketed separately and are often the reason to come – the programme runs to international names as well as Japanese ones. Check what is on before you decide which ticket you want; the Collection Room and the special exhibition are not the same purchase.

The museum is in Okazaki, the museum and shrine quarter east of the centre, ten minutes on foot from Higashiyama subway station on the Tozai line. Heian-jingu, the National Museum of Modern Art and the zoo are all within a few minutes, and the south end of the Philosopher’s Path is about twenty minutes’ walk north.

Hours are 10:00 to 18:00 with last admission at 17:30 – an hour later than the temples close, which makes this a good late-afternoon stop rather than a morning one. It closes Mondays unless the Monday is a public holiday, and over the new year from 28 December to 2 January.

If you are visiting on Jidai Matsuri day, the procession forms up at Heian-jingu a few minutes away and Okazaki is closed to traffic. The roof terrace that afternoon is the best free seat in the district.