This figure is one of 12 generals made to protect a statue of the Medicine Buddha, an important healing figure in Buddhism. He wears Chinese armor. This shows that Japanese artists often drew from Chinese art for their designs. They believed that using these existing models gave the statue powerful spiritual properties. Japanese sculptors linked each general to a Chinese zodiac animal. The horse on this general’s head corresponds to the Year of the Horse and a time of day associated with the horse. How is this general similar or different from other protectors or guardians you might know?
View the original at Cleveland Museum of Art →Article 2 defines a museum as an institution that collects, keeps and displays materials on history, art, folklore, industry and natural science for public use, carries out research on them, and which has been registered under Chapter 2 of this Act. The registration is not decorative. In law, an unregistered collection open to the public is not a museum.
The cool part. The definition of keeping is given as including raising. That single parenthesis is why a zoo, an aquarium and a botanical garden sit inside museum law in Japan: the collection is allowed to be alive. Article 1 also grounds the statute in the Social Education Act and the Basic Act on Culture and the Arts, which places museums in education first and culture second.
Verify at e-Gov 法令検索 →Use it Two-colour foil on uncoated stock gets you most of this at production cost.
Description source: museum curator text — not generated