At Japanese museums, art and nature merge

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Three scenes from the world of Japanese museums: 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