Kumamoto Decorated Tumuli Museum (熊本県立装飾古墳館) 熊本県立装飾古墳館

A 1992 building by Tadao Andō that imitates a tomb, in front of a real 107 m tumulus.

Kofun are the great burial mounds of Japanese chiefs, built from the 4th to the 7th century; in the ‘decorated’ ones the walls of the chamber, or the sarcophagus, bear circles, triangles, weapons and horses, in relief or painted. The museum explains that in Japan there are 849 of them, of which 212 are in Kumamoto, about a quarter, and 131 in the Kikuchi river basin alone: the red comes from the yellow ochre of Aso, easy to find here. It was founded under the national ‘fudoki no oka’ (archaeological parks) project as a specialist museum, and is a work by Tadao Andō, the Osaka architect and Pritzker Prize winner, completed in 1992 (平成4年) as a landmark of the prefecture's architecture programme, Kumamoto Artpolis. The building imitates a keyhole-shaped tumulus (前方後円墳) and is laid out in point symmetry with the real tumulus nearby, the Iwabaru Futagozuka: 107 m long, 9 high, from the 5th century, at the centre of the group of 13 tumuli of Iwabaru, a National Historic Site. The museum holds about 1,000 items.

Kumamoto

https://theanimetrip.com/luoghi/museo-tumuli-decorati-kumamoto