Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art (熊本県立美術館)

In July 1969 a fund for building the museum was set up and surveys began. A preparatory committee followed in June 1970 and a construction committee in March 1971. On 1 April 1972 the design was commissioned from Kunio Maekawa's office, and it was finished on 31 March 1973. Construction started on 17 May 1974 and the museum opened on 4 March 1976.

An annex building, the multipurpose room, was built in 1977 and opened on 10 September. Renovation work on the main building ended on 2 September 1997 and the museum reopened. In April 2008 the permanent Hosokawa Collection room opened in a separate building; a second room for that collection opened in April 2012 on the first floor of the main building.

In 1978 the museum received the BCS Prize. In 2006 it was one of two winners of the grand prize for general buildings in the JIA Twenty-Five Year Award (Japan Institute of Architects); the presentation was announced for 10 November at the architects' congress in Nara.

The museum sits in the north-west corner of the Kumamoto Castle grounds, on the plaza of the second bailey; the castle is a Special Historic Site designated by the state. Kunio Maekawa's office was responsible for its design. Low in profile, the building blends into the natural landscape around it.

It is a reinforced-concrete structure with one basement level and two storeys above ground, three in places. On a 14,200 m² site, it covers 3,446 m² of ground, for a floor area of 7,943 m², of which 2,315 m² are given to exhibition spaces and 1,063 m² to storage.

The museum's acquisitions cover old Japanese and Asian art, modern and contemporary Japanese art, and Western art, whose core is modern French painting, Western prints and modern and contemporary sculpture. The Imanishi Collection brings together ukiyo-e prints, tea utensils and art objects gathered by Kikumatsu Imanishi (1913-1987); one room is devoted to Chimei Hamada (1917-2018), a sculptor and artist born in Kumamoto.

On the lower level, a permanent room is devoted to painted and decorated kofun, megalithic tombs dated between 200 and 600 CE. Pieces from the Hosokawa Collection, which comes from the family that governed the Kumamoto domain from 1632, are shown on rotation in themed exhibitions, in the annex or in the main building. The café and its terrace look out over the castle grounds.

The museum is open from 9:30 to 17:15, with last entry at 16:45. It closes on Mondays (on the next weekday if the Monday is a public holiday) and over the year-end holidays; closing days do vary with the exhibitions and the period. The museum faces a road closed to ordinary traffic: it is reached on foot.