Kanazawa Nakamura Memorial Museum

This guide to the Kanazawa Nakamura Memorial Museum asks what game a Kanazawa sake brewer named Eishun Nakamura was really playing for four decades, starting in 1943, as he collected iron kettles, lacquer caddies and especially tea bowls. It traces tea ceremony's double life among merchants and samurai as a quiet contest of taste, where owning or naming the right bowl could make or ruin a reputation, and Nakamura's training in the Omotesenke school as he built a hoard of more than a thousand pieces. You'll hear why he decided, after Japan's defeat in the war, that his collection should stop being private. The museum still keeps a tearoom looking out over what he once called his own front yard.