YOU would think, if you ran a museum stuffed with more than one million exhibits, that picking out a few things to lend Hong Kong wouldn't really be much of a problem. At which Nishioka Yasuhiro laughs.
'It's been a big headache!' he says. 'Which pieces to bring? What kind? We have everything from the Neolithic period onwards!' In the end, the deputy director of the Tokyo National Museum made the only decision possible - and delegated to his heads of department. They each had to pick one item, their best from a museum that houses the largest collection in the country.
'That was the only way we could choose the highlight of what the museum has,' he says. 'They had a lot of trouble.' Much agonising later, 100 exhibits are on display at Hong Kong's Museum of Art in the first major show of Japanese art China has ever hosted. 'It sounds slightly impolite but there never seems to have been the slightest interest in Japanese art by the Chinese people before, no curiosity or demand,' says Yasuhiro.
Then last year Hong Kong lent treasures for an exhibition, Pearls Of The Orient, to the Tokyo National Museum, prompting Yasuhiro to suggest this exchange, though he says with admirable implacability that he first approached the Government with the idea in 1994.
Interestingly, with so much Japanese art potentially on offer, the SAR Government asked the Tokyo Museum to narrow its choices and only lend 19th-century Japanese pieces that illustrate a time of great transition in its art world.
'It was just felt that people here might find it more accessible, that it would be more suitable to show a period that had been so influenced by the colonials and Europeans,' says Yasuhiro.