The National Museum of Western Art

This guide to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo begins with a 1927 bank collapse in Kobe that forced shipbuilding tycoon Kojiro Matsukata to auction off the art collection he had built across London and Paris so young Japanese artists could see real Monets and Van Goghs at home. It follows the roughly four hundred works left behind in Paris through their own separate ordeal, seized as enemy property when France and Japan went to war, while Matsukata never saw them again. A French museum director had been keeping that remaining cache safe inside the Musee Rodin.