Hospitality that became the basis for the museum project

It was constructed on the occasion when a collection of the late Chief Director of the Okayama Gakuen Education Foundation, Yasuhara Shinjiro, was donated to the city of Okayama. The original collection initially consisted of about 2,000 objects of the Oriental art. At present, it has more than 4,800 objects.

An interesting fact is that in 1968, Prince Mikasa-no Miya Takahito visited the house of Mr. Yasuhara and, after having examined his collection, proposed an idea to create a public museum. Prince Mikasa-no Miya Takahito played a major role in the creation of the museum.‌‌ His Highness Prince Mikasa (1915 – 2016) had been a special adviser of the museum since 2004. He greatly contributed into the study and popularization of the collection. Scientists such as Egami Namio (1906 – 2002) and Fukai Shinji (1924 – 1985) also played an important role in the study of the collection.

The collection consists of art objects of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Iran and Central Asia, as well as Greece and Rome, from the Paleolithic to the modern periods. Most of it is devoted to the time of the first city-states formation (IV millennium BC) to the Islamic period.

You can learn more about the topic in the book-album "Cultural legacy of Central Asia in Japanese Museums" (volume XX) in the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections".

The main sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.