About this site

Meiga no Furusato is a site for finding paintings of places across Japan, and masterpieces you can see in Japanese museums, by prefecture. It takes up, one work at a time, the famous places in the ukiyo-e of Hokusai and Hiroshige and the masterpieces held by museums around the country, and explains their highlights, the places they depict and the artists' lives. We hope that paintings will be your way in, and a reason to visit the places and museums themselves.

We cover only works whose copyright term has expired (in Japan, works by artists who died in 1967 or earlier).

Details such as the date of a work and the museums that hold it are checked against museums' collection databases and official commentaries, and each page lists its sources and the date of checking. The commentary texts are written originally for this site.

Museum exhibitions change over time. Even if a museum is listed as holding a work, the work is not necessarily on display at all times. Please check each museum's exhibition information before you visit.

We use images that museums and other institutions publish under terms allowing use, including commercial use (such as ColBase of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, the National Museums' Integrated Collection Database, the National Diet Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago). In line with each set of terms, the source is credited under the image. Images are reduced in size on this site.

For works whose museum does not publish an image, we may use a faithful, front-on photograph of the flat work released into the public domain on Wikimedia Commons. In that case, the image is not provided by the museum. For works with neither, we show no image and link to the museum's page for the work instead.

This site is not produced or endorsed by any museum. If you have concerns about an image or any content, please contact us through the contact form. We will review it promptly and respond.

To improve the site, we use Google Analytics, an analytics tool provided by Google. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect information such as the pages viewed and the device and browser used, in a form that does not identify individuals. The information collected is managed under Google's privacy policy. You can stop the collection by disabling cookies in your browser settings or by using the opt-out add-on provided by Google.