Room 45: Japan
Room 45 contains a wide range of treasures from Japan including swords and armour, netsuke (small carvings), wood-block prints, textiles, lacquer, ceramics and other articl…
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Japan: land and climate
Japan consists of over 1,000 islands situated east of the Asian mainland. The four largest islands, Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku account for 97% of Japan's land mas…
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The Edo Period in Japanese History
Many objects in the V&A's collections come from the Edo period (1615 - 1868), a period of great significance in Japan's history.
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Japanese art & design: line
Line is used to make all-over decorative pattern and for borders. Objects display a striking variety of patterns made up of straight lines.
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Japanese art & design: shape & balance
Shape is an important element of Japanese style and decoration. The most obvious forms are those based on the square and rectangle, which are used for lacquer boxes, chests…
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Japanese art & design: pictorial narrative
Traditional Japanese pictorial decoration is conceptual rather than realistic, and reads from right to left. One picture may illustrate a sequence of events that occurred a…
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Japanese art & design: wabi-sabi
A complex aesthetic, wabi-sabi is a combination of rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness (wabi), together with the beauty and serenity of age, where an object acquires …
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Japanese motifs & symbols: animals, insects & birds
Many Japanese art and crafts have decoration or shapes based on the natural world, reflecting the Shinto belief in the importance of the seasonal succession of seed time an…
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Japanese motifs & symbols: natural features
The natural world - mountains, clouds, rivers, the sea - are often depicted in Japanese art. Clouds represent elegance and high status. In Buddhism, clouds signify the ‘Wes…
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Japanese motifs & symbols: plants & flowers
Images used to decorate Japanese artefacts are often wonderfully simple and effective communicators of meaning. The images are usually not meant to be realistic, and may no…
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A gift in your will
You may not have thought of including a gift to a museum in your will, but the V&A is a charity and legacies form an important source of funding for our work. It is not just the great collectors and the wealthy who leave legacies to the V&A. Legacies of all sizes, large and small, make a real difference to what we can do and your support can help ensure that future generations enjoy the V&A as much as you have.
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Japanese Art and Design (New Edition)
The V&A's greatest treasures from the Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art shine in this newly updated overview of Japanese art from the last four cent…
Buy nowEvent - BSL Talks: Japanese Enamels
Fri 28 June 2013 18:30
BSL TOUR: Join Chisato Minamimuro as she talks about the diverse range of Japanese Enamels in the V&A collection.
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