3 Best Sights in Western Honshu, Japan

Located outside of Matsue City in neighboring Yasugi, The Adachi Museum of Art is well worth the trip. The gardens around the museum are some of the most breathtaking in all of Japan. The path around the gardens reveals new delights around every corner. Adding to their beauty is the borrowed landscape backdrop of low hills and forests beyond. The museum interior has a large selection of 19th- and 20th-century Japanese masters as well as temporary exhibitions throughout the year. The museum runs free shuttle buses every 30 minutes from Yasugi Station which take 20 minutes. Yasugi Station is 27 minutes east of Matsue Station on the local train (¥420). Try to time your arrival close to the museum opening hour of 9 am to avoid group tours, which start arriving around 10:30.

Next to the Shukkei Garden, this museum is a visual treat. Standouts include two particularly surrealistic pieces: a typically fantastical piece by Salvador Dalí called Dream of Venus; and Ikuo Hirayama's much closer-to-home Holocaust at Hiroshima. Hirayama, who became one of Japan's most acclaimed artists, was a junior-high-school student at the time the A-bomb was dropped. The museum also holds excellent rotating exhibitions of art from classic to contemporary.

In 1930, noted art collector and founder Magosaburo Ohara built this Parthenon-style building to house a collection of Western art with works by El Greco, Corot, Manet, Monet, Rodin, Gauguin, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and many others. They were shrewdly acquired for him by his friend Kojima Torajiro, a talented artist whom he dispatched to Europe for purchases. The museum is wonderfully compact and can be appreciated in a single morning or an afternoon. Two wings exhibit Japanese paintings, tapestries, woodblock prints, and pottery—including works by Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach—as well as modern and ancient Asian art, much of it also brought home from trips made by Torajiro at Ohara's behest. The adjoining Kogei-kan (crafts hall) displays a selection of ceramic and textile art and is housed in a beautiful Edo-period storehouse.