Bernard Buffet Museum (ベルナール・ビュフェ美術館)

The museum was founded by Kiichiro Okano (1917-1995) and opened on 25 November 1973. Okano first came across Bernard Buffet's work in the early 1950s, when the damage of the war was still plain to see; he went on to gather representative pieces from each period of the painter's career, then chose to set up his museum close to his home town.

The main building, completed in 1973, is by Kiyonori Kikutake, who had led the Metabolism group's architectural movement in the 1960s. The museum invited Buffet in 1980, and he travelled to Japan for the first time. A new wing was added on 9 December 1988 as the collection grew, and a print pavilion, now the annex, followed on 20 May 1996. Buffet visited the museum seven times with his wife; the last of these visits was for the opening of that pavilion in May 1996.

The main building combines cube, cylinder and triangular-prism forms.

At the centre, the triangular prism is the large exhibition hall: its white wall, which can also recall a ship's sail, carries the inscription "Musée Bernard Buffet". Inside, a twelve-metre-high void opens under natural overhead light, giving the hall a solemn atmosphere. Bright galleries to the left and right (the cylinders) surround the hall, and rectangular, cube-shaped exhibition rooms complete the building.

Two extensions were added to this building afterwards. A connecting corridor leads to the 1988 new wing, whose exhibition room with a large ramp, long in use, was remodelled in 2012 into a spacious room able to hold very different kinds of work; storage and management areas were improved at the same time. The 1996 annex, linked to the new wing by a passage, holds on its first floor a temporary exhibition room in the form of a plain, versatile cube; a staircase with bright windows leads down to the children's museum on the ground floor.

The museum shows the work of Bernard Buffet, a French painter representative of post-war figurative painting. The collection holds more than 2,000 pieces: oils, watercolours, drawings, prints, illustrated books and posters.

On the ground floor of the annex, the Buffet Children's Museum of Art lets children approach art through play: they take off their shoes to step onto a wooden floor, slip into the role of a figure from Buffet's paintings, play in a pool of wooden balls and leaf through picture books by contemporary artists.

The museum opens from 10:00 to 17:00 or 16:30 depending on the season, with last admission 30 minutes before closing. It is closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays (when one of those days is a public holiday, the museum opens and closes on the following Friday instead), over the year-end holidays, between exhibitions and, without notice, in severe weather or power cuts. Children of primary-school age or younger must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

From JR Mishima Station the museum is reached by taxi, in about twenty minutes when traffic is clear; visitors can also come by car.