We often write of the amazing circumstances which lead to things working out in just the right way. Today’s adventure was the pinnacle of this kind of occurrence.

Weeks ago, in Fukushima, the Miakes had told us of a modern art museum built underground on (in) Naoshima Island (直島), off the coast of Shikoku. Intrigued, we had circled the island on our map and made plans to go there when we got near. Clearly, our path has been much altered since then, but still we managed to find ourselves near a port that sends ferries to the island. Yesterday morning, while quickly borrowing internet from the camp staff, we had mentioned that we were planning to go to Naoshima on Monday.

“Hmmm… you want to go to Naoshima? Will you stay the night?” the camp staffer had asked.

“Yeah, we will probably try and find somewhere out of the way to camp, there are no campsites on the island.” Christophe replied.

“Well, wait a minute” she mumbled under her breath as she pulled out her cell and began placing a call.

Five minutes later we had a place to stay in Naoshima, our camp staffers parent’s home. What’s more, they had let her know the museum would be closed on Monday, so we had better go on Sunday (today) and they had given her the ferry times. As such, this morning we woke very early, packed up our tent, and rode quickly to the ferry terminal an hour away. By 9am we were being greeted at the ferry terminal in Naoshima by an old man in a red baseball cap.

Isoguchi-san looks to be in his late 60s, fully mobile as he jumped on his small scooter to guide us to his home. At the house we dropped our bikes and met Mrs. Isoguchi, an adorable woman not more then 5 feet tall and in total shock at the lumbering, Japanese speaking foreigners, but welcoming nonetheless. After a very brief exchange of greetings we were ushered into Isoguchi-san’s car and were racing off toward the Chichu Art Museum. On the way, he handed us two plastic yearly passes to the museum, saving us each a $20 entrance charge. We arrived at the ticket counter 30 minutes before the museum was due to open, so we made small talk outside the entrance with our host.

He had come to Naoshima in 1946 at the age of 17 because the factory on the island was recruiting. At the time, he recalled, he had never even heard of Naoshima even though he lived only a 2 hour ferry ride away, near Kobe. He had lived here ever since, never having left Japan, never having traveled further north then Tokyo. We must have amused him, young Americans determined to see all of Japan. His Japanese was tough to follow, but not impossible, and I think he had as much trouble with mine as I with his. He seemed to take to Christophe though, and I soon found myself fighting just to keep up with the conversation. Suddenly looking up from the Japanese haze I realized the nearly empty entrance way to the museum had filled with people, and, as the doors were opened, an entire tour bus pulled up. Immediately a line began to form, and in classic, old Japanese man style, Isoguchi-san snatched back the yearly passes from us and snaked his way to the front. He handed us our tickets, told us to meet him back here in an hour an a half (it would only take an hour he assured, but agreed to an hour and a half so we wouldn’t feel rushed). We were the second couple to enter the museum that morning.

The museum building itself is a work of art, designed by Tadao Ando to reside within a mountain, almost unnoticeable from the outside but for the entrance and skylights, and using almost exclusively natural light inside. It is an amazing experience simply to walk through the naturally lit halls buried within the mountain. The museum itself only has three artists work; five of Claude Monet’s water lilies, three installations by James Turrell and an installation by Walter De Maria. The Monet pieces are all within a large white room lit entirely by natural light, a breathtaking space for the pieces. As we stood staring at the impressionist’s work, clouds drifted past the sun and the light in the room shifted. It was as if we were outside by the pond itself, and yet looking up, there appeared to be only ceiling.

James Turrell is an artist fascinated by light and creates spaces that use light to confuse one’s perception of space. We had seen another work by him at the Modern Art Museum in Kanazawa, a large room with a rectangular hole missing from the ceiling (Open Sky). It almost looked like a painting of the sky from below, until you noticed that the clouds were moving. Here there were three pieces of his, from different points in his career, the most recent resembling the piece in Kanazawa. The other two both involved neon lights; one involving two room, one lit in blue set up a staircases from the other, lit in a soft yellow. Walking between the two rooms truly felt like passing “through the looking glass” into another world.

The Walter De Maria piece was also naturally lit, through a skylight in the ceiling, and was made up of gold leafed wooden sculptures placed around the room to catch the light in different ways. At the center of the room stood a large, polished granite sphere that reflected the scene from the skylight, the golden rods and the people milling about the room.

The museum was really incredible and I am so happy we were able to go there, but I am even more thankful we did not have to spend $40 to do it. The entire experience would have been severely marred by a feeling of panic at dropping so much money on a museum that, in the end, contained very little. But the simplicity of the museum was its charm, and we happily enjoyed it.

At 11:30 Isoguchi-san met us and packed us back into the car. He drove us quickly over to the Benesse Museum, Tadao Ando’s first building on Naoshima – another museum he could get us into for free. This museum was part museum, part hotel, filled with a variety of fun Modern Art pieces – my favorite being a wall filled with connected world flags made in colored sand and inhabited by a giant ant colony. We began to realize that Naoshima was not home to a single art museum, but rather many. It seemed as if the entire island had been invaded by a colony of artists (or art lovers who came after the artists had departed). Inside the Benesse we admired a large painting of two small boats, one yellow and one black, washed up on the beach. In front of the painting, the boats sat as sculptures. Out on the balcony of the museum we starred out at the amazing shoreline when I saw them, again one yellow and one black in the same orientation, on the beach below. The artists had made the island into a giant instillation.

After the Benesse Museum were were $60 in our guides debt, but he was not through with us yet. Back in the car he drove us down a a park filled with fun colorful sculptures, including a rather famous giant spotted pumpkin. After some quick photos we were back in the car, weaving through a narrow street that worked its way around a large lake. On the side of the road we stopped to admire a giant trash can sculpture that somehow seemed to fit into the natural space. Our guide asked us what we wanted to do for lunch, we said anything cheap, and so he headed in the direction of the “center”.

The “center” it turned out was the “General Welfare Center” of Naoshima where one could get a full set lunch for about $6. He walked us to the door of the restaurant and said he would be back in an hour to pick us up. It was like having a private taxi for the day!

And hour later, stuffed, we were loaded back into the car and handed one “Art House Project” pass each (bringing the total expense of our museum costs to $90 saved by having Isoguchi-san as our guide). The “Art House Project”, as stated by my pass “involves the restoration of old houses and the transformation of these houses into works of art by artists”. Scattered around the main town area of Naoshima there are five houses and one shrine that have been transformed into works of art.

We wandered around town, our guide always milling around the area of the house we were in, spotting us as we came out and setting off in the direction of the next location. It felt like we were following a video game guide who you can never quite catch up with but who always keeps you going in the right direction – our Navi. Each of the houses were designed by a different artist; an udon shop that had a room of molded black plastic and a two story tall Statue of Liberty, a simple black fronted house that led to a stone garden overlooked by two tatami rooms filled with stone flowers, a Japanese home where the tatami room had been replaced by an indoor pond at the bottom of which sat digital displays of different colors counting at different speeds from 1 to 9, a very traditional house that was done with very modern and artistic touches, and finally a home that was completely gutted and dark in which you had to sit for 10 minutes to allow for your eyes to adjust before wandering about the room (another Turrell light installation). The shrine had a glass staircases leading up to in and also down into the ground to meet an underground lake that could be viewed after walking down a long narrow cement hall just large enough to fit one person through. On the way out the horizon completely overwhelmed the exit view, making you feel as if you were about to walk straight into it.

Exhausted and excited by all of these different houses, we fell back into the car and were taken home to re-coop over coffee and treats offered by tiny Mrs. Isoguchi. My brain was overwhelmed by the whirlwind of art I had seen today, and was not up to the task of Japanese, so I lost myself in the snacks. The next thing I knew we were being ushered back out to the car to visit the “Kaisha”. Kaisha, I thought, I knew the word but I couldn’t place it. I guess I was muttering it under my breath, because Christophe translated – we were going to see the “company”.

I felt like I was in Pittsburgh being given a tour by my father.

“You see this here, this was all company ground. But they sold it and turned it all into houses. Looks totally different now.” our guide narrated in Japanese as we drove around the town. Christophe translated the overall feel of the tour best with this excerpt:

“You see this house here. It’s totally uninteresting. But you know what happened inside it? Nothing that cool, my boss lived here. But he was the boss of the biggest factory on Naoshima. What did our factory do, something with earth. And maybe gold and silver, I can’t remember, but definitely earth.”

It was a totally different view of Naoshima. The “company” had taken up the majority of the town we were driving through. In fact, when it was running, the population had been around 8,000 people on the island. But it had closed, and although there were other factories, including a new recycling plant, the population was down to around 3,000. We made our way to the still running companies.

It looked as if someone had taken a huge sculpting knife and simply cut out chunks of the hills that make up Naoshima. In this cut out chunks, huge pieces of machinery and large warehouses had been placed. This barren land stood in stark contrast with the carefully constructed Chichu museum we had seen this morning. It was the “real Naoshima “, the reason people lived on these islands. The art movement was only about 20 years old on the island, but these factories had pulled in young people since the war, maybe before.

Back at the home we decided to visit one last work of art – the Naoshima Bathhouse which had been designed by on of the “Art House Project” artists. It was a great bath, the only “modern” sento I have been to in Japan. The floor of the bath was a collage of 60s bikini snapshots and edo period woodcut porn. A giant elephant stood on the wall that separated the men’s and women’s sides. The view from the large window was of cacti and pitcher plants which found plenty of heat from the giant water boilers behind them. We ate a quick dinner at a local restaurant (I am not sure that our elderly hosts really do dinner, although they had promised us breakfast in the morning) and returned to the house.

Back home Mrs. Isoguchi had prepared us beds, which she ushered us to along with a tray bearing two glasses and a pitcher of water. I fell asleep almost instantly.