Top Museums in Kyoto
A visual guide from the Kyoto travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Kyoto's two biggest art museums face each other across a single road in Okazaki, either side of a canal carrying water tunnelled through the hills from Lake Biwa. The Kyocera Museum of Art reopened in 2020 with a sunken glass entrance grafted onto a 1933 building, and the National Museum of Modern Art sits directly opposite. The Kyoto National Museum, the deepest collection of the three, is a ride south near Shichijo. Away from all of them, the city puts its smaller museums in converted primary schools, a red-brick Meiji bank and a working locomotive roundhouse.
The Okazaki cluster
Higashiyama station on the Tozai subway line puts you a few minutes from both. The Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art kept its 1933 tiled roof and grand hall while the renovation buried a new glass-fronted entrance below the forecourt, with the East Wing handling contemporary shows. Across the street, the National Museum of Modern Art holds strong Japanese painting, ceramics and photography collections in a Fumihiko Maki building. A bus ride or a half-hour walk south, the Kyoto National Museum pairs Katayama Tokuma's 1890s brick hall with Yoshio Taniguchi's spare 2014 galleries, and remains the best single overview of Japanese art in the city.
Beyond the big names
The Kyoto International Manga Museum at Karasuma-Oike occupies a 1920s elementary school and lines its corridors with some 50,000 volumes that visitors carry out to read on the lawn. It is an easy hour, a rare wet-weather option, and the cafe is genuinely good. The Kyoto Railway Museum at Umekoji is the strongest family choice, with more than fifty vehicles, a preserved roundhouse and turntable, and short steam runs. The Museum of Kyoto uses the old Bank of Japan branch, a red-brick landmark on Sanjo. In Arashiyama, the small, modern Fukuda Art Museum has a cafe window facing the Togetsukyo bridge.