Kyoto National Museum

Kyoto’s museums do not share a convention. The Manga Museum closes Wednesdays, the Kyocera Museum closes Mondays, and this one closes Mondays too – but it also has a second, invisible calendar.

The Collection Gallery, in the modern Heisei Chishinkan wing, rotates its display several times a year, and between rotations the whole gallery goes dark. Special exhibitions in the old Meiji Kotokan building run to their own dates. There are consequently stretches of the year – usually late summer and early autumn, and again in winter – when the national museum of the old capital has nothing on display at all.

This is not obscure or hidden. It is on the museum’s front page. It simply does not survive into third-party guides, which print ‘closed Mondays’ and stop. Check kyohaku.go.jp in the week you travel; if it says only the gardens are on view, put the afternoon somewhere else.

The collection is roughly 14,500 objects with another 6,500 on deposit, covering Japanese and East Asian art up to the end of the Edo period, and it is strongest exactly where Kyoto is strongest: Heian and Kamakura Buddhist sculpture and painting, medieval ink painting, ceramics, textiles, and calligraphy.

The Heisei Chishinkan, opened in 2014, is a Taniguchi Yoshio building – the architect of the Museum of Modern Art extension in New York – and it handles a difficult brief well: hanging scrolls and sculpture want low, even light, and the galleries deliver it without feeling like a basement.

Set against it, the 1895 Kotokan across the courtyard is a brick French Renaissance pile by Katayama Tokuma, an Important Cultural Property in its own right. It is no longer used for the permanent display and opens only for special exhibitions, which is a shame, because it is the better room.

The museum sits directly opposite Sanjusangendo, about a kilometre and a half from Kyoto Station. The two together are the strongest indoor half-day in the city and the right answer to a day of rain.

Use the Friday evening. Opening to 20:00 solves the structural problem with Kyoto – that the temples all shut between 16:30 and 17:00 and the evening has nothing in it but dinner. A Friday with temples until five and the museum until eight is a better day than most itineraries manage.

On price: ¥700 is for the Collection Gallery. Special exhibitions are ticketed separately and are usually a good deal more, and during a special exhibition the collection display is often reduced. If the museum’s calendar shows a special exhibition running, assume you are paying the exhibition price rather than ¥700.