Nezu Museum

This guide to the Nezu Museum in Tokyo begins with the railway magnate Nezu Kaichiro bidding on a pair of gold folding screens in 1914, and the decades he spent building one of Japan's great collections of Japanese and East Asian art. It follows his son's opening of a museum on the family's Aoyama estate, the 1945 air raid that destroyed the buildings, and the family's postwar reopening out of temporary rooms. Take your time in the bamboo-lined approach to the garden before you go in.