HERE'S THE BRIEF: put together the first exhibition to cover the turbulent 120-year cultural history and development of two of the world's most transformative cities - a history marked by modernity, fascism, war, destruction, rebirth and, finally, metamorphosis beyond imagination.
One might imagine Mori Art Museum director David Elliott frowning over a smoking tape recorder to the theme tune of Mission: Impossible when the Tokyo-Berlin exhibition was proposed. The cities are hardly a likely couple. But Elliott was undeterred.
'There are an incredible number of links between the two cities which aren't really known about and which, in their way, have been influential,' he says. 'I think many people will be surprised to learn how deep they go.'
Elliott says the ties that bind Tokyo and Berlin stem from a similar history. 'They're both newly invented cities.'
Tokyo dispatched its envoys across the world after it reinvented itself as Japan's capital in 1868 during the Meiji Restoration, just as Berlin became the capital of the new German empire in 1871.
The results of this first encounter are woven through Japan's artistic, architectural, political and educational landscape like strands of cultural DNA - as anyone who has seen the German-inspired black uniforms of Japanese schoolboys might acknowledge. Among other examples, the exhibition highlights two Berlin architects who designed Tokyo's original Ministry of Justice building (1887).