Tokyo University of the Arts Now Offering Free Guided Tour of New Storage Building, Completed in 2024

Old & New video

By Ryuzo Suzuki / Yomiuri Shimbun Senior Photographer

17:54 JST, January 25, 2026

TORIDE, Ibaraki — A free tour by a professional guide for the general public is now being offered at an artwork storage facility on the Toride Campus of the Tokyo University of the Arts.

The facility is officially called the University Art Museum Toride Annex Storage and was completed in 2024. The reinforced concrete building has three stories and a total floor space of about 2,200 square meters.

It is normally closed to the public, and able to store art-related materials and students’ works, which continue to increase in number each year, for the next 20 years.

With a history of nearly 140 years, the university is said to house about 30,000 artworks and materials, including paintings, sculptures and crafts, many of which were created by outstanding alumni from the Meiji era (1868-1912) to the present. While there are other on-campus storage spaces, this new facility was built to address storage scarcity due to an increase in artworks.

There are four purposes of the new facility: to maintain artworks under the appropriate temperature and humidity and pass them on to future generations; to promote the appeal of the university’s collection to the local community and the world; to promote understanding of the storage and management efforts in the facility; and to learn how artworks should be stored.

The concept was a “storage facility that attracts people.” To achieve this, the guided tour was organized.

However, there are various rules in place to protect the environment inside the facility, normally only accessible by the museum staff, and prevent accidents during guided tours.

No shoes are allowed inside the facility. Visitors are required to change slippers twice before viewing the artworks, use adhesive sheets placed on the floor to remove dust and dirt from the slippers and wear face masks when talking to prevent saliva from touching the works.

It is the facility’s second floor that is open to the public. Visitors can see the artworks stored in a large room called the “front room” up close. Through a small window in the front room, visitors can also look into the storage room at the back, which stores artworks protected by wooden frames.

“I took part in the tour because I was very interested in the museum’s stockroom,” said a school employee from Osaka. “I was impressed by the explanation of how the artworks are stored. The staff were very professional and the tour itself was like a work of art.”

The tour is generally held twice on Tuesday afternoons. Each tour is limited to 15 people and takes 45 minutes. The tour is free of charge but reservations are required through the museum’s website.

The museum plans to change the artworks viewable by those on the tour once a year, with the next change to take place in April 2026.