The Museum of Asian Art in Corfu exhibited 150 works of Japanese art from the collections of the Metropolitan Tokyo Edo – Tokyo Museum in Tokyo, Japan, which is the most modern and largest state museum in the country of the Rising Sun with 2,000,000 visitors a year.

The temporary exhibition was entitled: “Saraku and other hidden Japanese masterpieces from the land of Nausicaa” and lasted from 4th July 2009 until 6th September 2009. Sharaku is the most famous Japanese artist whose paintings have been lost. His woodcuts have survived while there are only two of his paintings left in the world. One is in the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the other – of greater value and artistic significance – in Corfu.

The exhibition also included maps and information about Greece, especially about Corfu and the Museum of Asian Art.

The sponsor of the exhibition was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the Yomiuri Shinbun (10.000.000 sheets daily) which is associated with the major museums of Europe and America, such as the Louvre, the Prado and the Boston museum. The exhibition in Tokyo of the Museum of Asian Art’s Japanese collection lasted 3 months, was widely recognized by the Japanese public, and proved in the most convincing way the cultural relations between the two countries, and showed that in Greece there is an interest in Japanese culture equivalent to that of Japanese interest in Greek culture.

The exhibition was organized in the context of the completion of 110 years of diplomatic relations between Greece and Japan (1899 – 2009).