Setagaya Art Museum Mukai Junkichi Atelier

Climb the stone steps into a green oasis to discover the studio-home of Junkichi Mukai (1901–1995). Built in the 1960s and incorporating elements brought from rural Iwate, the building feels like a fragment of old Japan that’s slipped into residential Setagaya.

Born in Kyoto, Mukai grew up immersed in the natural environment and culture of the ancient capital. After studying in Kansai and Tokyo, he travelled to Paris in the late 1920s, where he learned Western techniques that later shaped his realist style. Yet he is best known as ‘Mukai of the old houses’, devoting over 40 years, well into his 80s, to travelling across Japan to paint its rapidly vanishing thatched-roof dwellings and seasonal rural landscapes. 

This is a place where the past is lovingly remembered. First in the quaint wooden atelier itself, a preserved remnant of old Tokyo, and then again in the paintings it holds, which reveal just how quickly Japan’s landscape transforms.