At Japanese museums, art and nature merge

Odawara, Japan: You walk along a level daylight-filled corridor, some 300 feet long, one side lined with glass, the other with volcanic stones pockmarked by fossilized insects. Nearing the end, as trees and plantings fall away, you reach a balcony overlooking the mists of Sagami Bay. The passage has led from stone gardens toward water and cloud, from solid ground to a perch cantilevered in space. And it is aligned so that, at the dawn of the summer solstice, the sun shines directly through the passage; you walk into light.

Naoshima, Japan: The pilgrimage from Kyoto requires a series of trains followed by a ferry to an island port. Head along a coastal road, and eventually, when you look out over the water, you see a giant gourd—a bulbous, outrageous, polka-dotted pumpkin—more than 6 feet high. It squats at the end of a dock that stretches out into the Seto Inland Sea, mountains and freighters in the distance.

Koka, Japan: You walk up a paved road that winds through woodlands lined with cherry trees until you reach a dark hole carved into a hill. It looks like a portal leading to another dimension. It is a tunnel, lined with 850 semireflective stainless-steel perforated plates. The effect is otherworldly, with unexpected patterns of tree-green light seeping in from the opening. Then, around a curve, another portal appears, and through it you glimpse a structure in the distance with a glass-tessellated roof. It somehow recalls a Japanese farmhouse,framed by a web of wires that spread like the spines of a fan: The tunnel opens onto a bridge over a gorge that then leads directly to the museum itself.

These aesthetic worlds were all created within the past 30 years. But for an observer who has spent much of a museum-going life immersed in Western culture—which imprinted the world with the very concept of a museum—it is startling to come upon such places. The Western museum is a secular temple of sorts, in which artifacts and artworks chronicle a civilization’s origins or display its greatest achievements or its encyclopedic reach; it is a culture’s monumental tribute to itself. There are such museums in Japan, like the Tokyo National Museum, which was founded in the 1870s, after the “opening" of Japan to Western influence, but also others, with different ambitions.

The first example is from the Enoura Observatory. It opened in 2017 and is the creation of the Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, who purchased 11 acres overlooking the bay. Expansive views of bamboo groves, orange orchards and lush hills combine with his own installations that invoke circular religious sites, a Roman amphitheater, Shinto temples and modernist geometries. These installations allude to ways varied cultures—particularly Japanese cultures—have paid homage to the natural world through ritual and devotion. The mystery of the natural order is answered by human attempts to pay it tribute—but also to rival it in beauty or significance.

A related impression is given by the second example from the “art island" of Naoshima where Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted pumpkin has waterfront property. You walk on paths leading through woods or onto beaches or up roadways to modernist buildings half submerged in the earth. Stone stairs lengthen as you climb, altering your sense of space; reflective spheres float on the surface of a pond; an open field is sliced by a tilted metal sheet and a silver arch. Nature and artifice intertwine.

Multiple buildings on this site are designed by the architect Tadao Ando—including the Chichu Art Museum, where, unlike other museums, you must remove your shoes before entering galleries, as if in a Buddhist temple. One gallery features the slowly shifting colors of a light installation by the American artist James Turrell; another, white-tiled and naturally lighted, is devoted to five of Monet’s paintings of water lilies. Outside or in, nature is framed for us by art and art is framed by nature.

Some aspects of these experiences are familiar to Western visitors. Mr. Turrell’s hypnotic work has been featured in American museums. We are familiar, too, with outdoor sculpture gardens. But in Japan, it is difficult to escape the sense that exploration of the natural world and the place of art within it is a recurring theme. (In a spirit of wondrous novelty, it is even evident in the immersive environments of the capital’s most popular art attraction, “teamLab Planets Tokyo.")

This approach also seems to have its origins in the history of Japanese gardens. One scholar, David A. Slawson, examines two Japanese garden manuals from the 11th and 15th centuries in hisbook “Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens." He points out that originally such gardens were designed to be seen from a single vantage point, within the dwelling. Gardens used a specialized symbolic language governing interactions between various types of stone, stream and plantings. Later, they became more dynamic, so a walk through the garden offered a sequence of sensations. But the garden did not mirror nature; it revealed nature’s interior tensions through its own artifice.

So too, in these institutions. We are being led to varied vistas—like the view from the balcony of the summer-solstice corridor. Nature and art are each transformed by the presence of the other.

This is particularly powerful in the third example: the Miho Museum in the Shiga Prefecture. The museum’s architect was I.M. Pei, who created it for Mihoko Koyama, an art collector who was also leader of Shinji Shumeikai, a religious group that emphasizes devotion to the powers of art and beauty. Pei said the project brought to mind a Tang Dynasty Chinese poem, “Peach Blossom Spring," about a fisherman who travels down a river, its banks dense with peach blossoms; he discovers a secret path leading to a Shangri-La, isolated from the strife and sorrows of ordinary life.

Pei constructed such a journey, leading to a museum that is buried almost three-quarters underground so as not to spoil the surrounding nature preserve. Every window offers a framed landscape; Pei even transplanted a 150-year-old pine that dominates the sweeping view from the central atrium’s windows. And each gallery offers recurring structural and geometric motifs surrounding objects from ancient civilizations—Rome, Greece, Egypt and Asia—bearing spiritual significance. Pei said it was the “most inspired" project he had worked on. It is the most beautiful museum I have seen.

In the West, modern museums evolved from so-called Cabinets of Curiosities, which typically displayed wondrous artifacts of the natural world—shells, fossils, plants and organisms—taken from their context and mounted inside. The natural world is sampled and split apart, studied and displayed.

But in Japan, museums may have almost opposite origins, with deep roots in the idea of gardens. In this case, the outdoor world is the staging ground; it is shaped, modified and cultivated using the powers of art. And as we proceed on our pilgrimages, we are lured into these creations, like walkers in a garden—or, more dramatically, like the wanderers and hermits who appear amid cliffs and weather-beaten trees in paintings of extraordinary Japanese landscapes.

Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large.