Hasegawa Machiko Art Museum

This museum was opened on November 3, 1985 by Machiko Hasegawa, creator of the manga Sazae-san, to show the artworks she collected together with her older sister Mariko. It stands in a residential area of Sakurashinmachi in Setagaya, Tokyo. It first opened as the Hasegawa Museum and took its present name in 1992, after Machiko's death.

The core of the displays is the collection the sisters began assembling around 1955. It numbers 789 works: 311 Japanese-style paintings, 250 Western-style paintings, 195 craft pieces, 32 sculptures and one woodblock print, shown in rotation in collection exhibitions held several times a year. What you see depends on when you visit, and the shop sells original goods that cannot be bought elsewhere.

Machiko Hasegawa was born in Saga Prefecture in 1920 and moved to Tokyo with her family in 1934, becoming a pupil of the manga artist Suiho Tagawa. Sazae-san began running in the Fukuoka evening paper Yukan Fukunichi on April 22, 1946, and the publisher Shimaisha was founded that December. From 1951 the strip ran in the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun until February 1974, and the Fuji TV anime began in 1969. Machiko died in May 1992 at the age of 72 and received the People's Honor Award that year.

The museum was built on the site of the book warehouse and distribution center of Shimaisha, the publishing company connected with the sisters. Across the street stands the annex, the Hasegawa Machiko Memorial Museum, which opened on July 11, 2020, the day marking 100 years since Machiko's birth. The displays of Machiko's own work that were once in the museum moved there, and the annex presents original manga art and related materials. One ticket covers both the museum and the memorial museum.

The roughly 500 m road from Sakura-shimmachi Station on the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line to the museum is called Sazae-san Street, lined with statues of the Sazae-san family. After the museum opened in 1985, the shopping street planned to make Sazae-san the symbol of the town, and the name became official in 1987. Machiko herself is said to have been wary at first about a work's title becoming the name of a street.

The museum is open from 10:00 to 17:30 (last entry 16:30) and closed on Mondays (the next day if Monday is a holiday), during exhibition changeovers and over the year-end and New Year holidays. Admission is 900 yen for adults, 800 yen for ages 65 and over, 500 yen for high school and university students and 400 yen for elementary and junior high students, with one ticket covering both the museum and the memorial museum. It is about a 7-minute walk from Sakura-shimmachi Station and works well as part of a neighborhood stroll. Parking is limited to about five spaces, so the museum asks visitors to use public transport where possible.