Huang Goodman · Art Forgotten

Art Forgotten

Art from public museum collections. A mismatched real Japanese law, and some other factoids.

Every object, image and description comes from the museum's own catalogue record, and every object links to its original. Japanese records are machine-translated into English; the museum's Japanese is kept beside the translation because it is the authoritative form. Each law carries its official number and links to e-Gov 法令検索, the Japanese government's statute database.

The Minister Toru Daijin Standing by a Lake Beneath a Crescent Moon, from the series A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poetry
{The Minister Toru Daijin Standing by a Lake Beneath a Crescent Moon, from the series A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poetry · Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849) · 1834–35 · Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0}

A high-ranking minister, Toru (822–895) was the son of an emperor. In this scene, he enjoys the company of two other men in his landscape garden overlooking the water. Here Hokusai may have illustrated a poem by Toru that mentions boats floating on the water in bright moonlight, shaded by the pines.

View the original at Cleveland Museum of Art →
The law
図書館法
Library Act
昭和二十五年法律第百十八号 · Act No. 118 of 1950

Article 3 tells libraries what to gather, and the list is wider than books: local materials, local administrative records, works of art, records and film. Article 3 also requires interlibrary lending, travelling collections and mobile libraries, so that the holdings move toward the reader rather than waiting.

The cool part. Article 17 is one sentence and admits nothing. A public library may not collect an admission fee, or any consideration whatsoever, for the use of library materials. Free is not a policy that a budget round can revisit, it is the statute. Article 26 is stranger still: the state and local authorities must not interfere in the work of a private library, and must not give it a subsidy. Independence is protected by withholding the money.

Verify at e-Gov 法令検索 →

Use it The border is the idea. Use it as an edge treatment and leave the centre empty.

Description source: museum curator text — not generated