Tea wares from abroad, and Steinlen’s cats: the autumn exhibitions at the Ebara Hatakeyama Museum of Art in Tokyo, 17 October – 13 December 2026

The Ebara Hatakeyama Museum of Art stands in Shirokanedai, in Minato ward, on the ten-thousand-square-metre estate that Issey Hatakeyama (1881–1971) assembled around a hall brought from Hannyaji temple in Nara and a Noh stage from the Yokoyama family. He opened the museum there in 1964 to show a collection of about 1,300 works of Japanese, Chinese and Korean art — tea utensils, calligraphy, ceramics, lacquer and Noh costumes, among them six National Treasures and thirty-three Important Cultural Properties, with tea wares from the daimyo tea master Matsudaira Fumai. After four and a half years of building work the museum reopened in the autumn of 2024 under its present name, with the main building restored and a new wing added.

Its autumn 2026 season, from 17 October to 13 December 2026, runs two exhibitions at once, and both turn on the same question: what happens to an object when it crosses a border. On the second floor of the main building, Longing for Foreign Lands looks at the imported wares that Japanese tea practice took in and made its own — the pieces that arrived from elsewhere and were then handled, named and valued by rules that were not those of their makers.

In the new wing, on the second floor and in the basement, Steinlen and Cats: Japonisme turns the traffic the other way. Théophile Alexandre Steinlen worked in the Paris of the late nineteenth century, and the cat — flattened, outlined, placed against a plain ground — is the motif in which the lessons of Japanese prints are most visible in his work. The exhibition follows Western artists’ encounter with Japanese art through that one animal, which is also a good way of watching a style being borrowed rather than merely admired.

Practical details

• When: 17 October to 13 December 2026
• Where: Ebara Hatakeyama Museum of Art, 2-20-12 Shirokanedai, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0071, Japan
• Opening hours: 10 am – 5 pm, last admission 4.30 pm; closed Mondays (the following Tuesday when the Monday is a public holiday)
• Admission: see the museum’s own ticket pages for current prices
• Organised by: Ebara Hatakeyama Museum of Art (The Ebara Hatakeyama Memorial Foundation)
• Information: telephone 050-5541-8600 (Hello Dial); enquiries through the museum’s own contact form

Cultural Heritage Online lists these exhibitions for readers who follow the tea ceremony collections of Tokyo and the long exchange between Japanese art and Europe.