Japan exhibit in Copenhagen’s Nationalmuseet
Denmark’s National Museum is located in Copenhagen. The ground floor consists of Danish and Human history. On the upper levels there are exhibits for each country. I don’t know if this is always the case, but the day we were there the upper levels were nearly completely void of visitors.
The collections were still impressive. Either no one knows of them or people get so tired from the ground level that they never make it up the stairs. One of the problems may be that while the collections are massive, there are no stories or detailed descriptions to go along with them (like there are for the ground floor exhibitions).
I headed upstairs to check out the Japanese collection. On my way I noted the impressive collection from Greenland. Surely the Nationalmuseet has the finest and largest assemblage of items from Greenland given Denmark’s history. I was amazed at the number of items they had, the condition, and the age.
Anyway, I eventually headed past Greenland and on to Japan.
The Nationalmuseet had several display cases with Ainu artifacts. Ainu are the original settlers of Japan and now nearly extinct. I was more than a bit surprised to find this much Ainu material in Denmark.
Samurai armor and helmets seem to be a centerpiece of these types of foreign exhibits on Japan.
Finally, we shall end on the mask exhibit. Having recently read The Street of a Thousand Blossoms and being a daily visitor to Ojisanjake’s blog, I found this portion of the Japan exhibit to be very interesting. I especially liked the bottom six masks which show the process from block of wood to finished mask.

































