Retread 1 - Akino Fuku Museum

I've had a lingering, but mild cold for the last week. But I'm still trying to get out and about. Since it was raining last Sunday I decided to see if I could find the museum in Tenryu that I was unable to find last January. This time, at least, I was armed with an idea of what the building looked like, as I had seen it on the internet. So I drove up to Tenryu and turned on the well marked street. But I still couldn't really spot the place. I decided to just park at the library and explore the area by foot. Since it was Sunday there seemed to be more people walking about. And some of them headed up a strange little hilly road with a crossgate across it, next to a very nondescript sign. So I decided to follow. It soon became apparent that this was the place I had seen on the internet. I paid my 300 yen, changed my shoes for slippers and got a brochure in English and was ready to explore. There were a ton of old people sitting in the first room looking exhausted. My, what had they been doing? I followed some folks down a long hallway and up some stairs to what was obviously a traveling exhibit. It was a strange mish-mash of souveniers and awards from Mr. Honda. The Mr. Honda. But mainly it had to do with race cars. There were newspaper clippings, award certificates, a few model cars and bad photos of Mr. Honda. There were also some general paintings intermixed with it. Not terribly good paintings, not bad, but not museum quality. So I'm assuming they were paintings done by the car man himself. But that's just a guess. Well, that took longer to explain than it did to view it. So I went downstairs to try and find the regular exhibits. Akino Fuku (or Fuku Akino, if you want to say it the Japanese way) was a modern Japanese artist who died in 2001. She spent a great deal of her life living all around Asia, and her paintings reflect the mixed styles of various countries. There were probably only 30 paintings on display, but some were extremely large. And I quite liked it. But even sitting down and looking at a book of all of her art and going through the place a second time, the whole visit probably took about 45 minutes. It took me that long just to drive there. But, the most important thing is that I found the blasted place. And it was a nice way to kill some time on a dreary rainy day.