#75 November 27, 2025

My Twenty Years with Nagasaki

I visited Nagasaki to give a lecture at an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum which I designed that opened in 2005.

The roots of the Kuma family are located in the city of Omura in Nagasaki Prefecture, and when I take a look back, I have visited Nagasaki during each turning point in my life. I dragged my father on the last trip that we took when he had been weakened considerably by cancer, and we managed to visit the family grave at Honkyo-ji Temple on this trip.

I put everything that I had into the entry for the design competition for this museum since this is the place where I have my roots, and was fortunate enough to have my design selected. The design is not particularly eccentric, but by considering the canal that runs through the middle of the site to be a feature rather than a negative limitation, we were able to create an open plan in which you can sense the water in the canal from virtually all parts of the museum. From this perspective, transforming negative elements of each site into positive ones is a characteristic of the Kuma style of architecture.

I strongly feel that Nagasaki has had a diverse range of impacts on me, and how to build bridges to the different cultures represented by China which is a neighbor and the West across the ocean is the theme for this city, as well as the foremost theme in my architecture.

As a matter of fact, my ancestors were part of the Omura clan, and continued to be bombarded by the ban on Christianity and Omura upheaval, leaving their names in the history of Omura. To put it simply, Nagasaki was the borderline between the West and East where conflicts took place, and I have been nurtured as an architect from this struggle.

The subtle design of the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum which I designed to be built on this borderline appears to resonate with a certain type of person, and the singer & composer Yumi Matsutoya who visited this structure several years after it was completed suddenly asked to have a talk with me. In fact, I had appeared on a radio program in Nagasaki, and selected “One Afternoon by the Sea” (Umi Wo Miteita Gogo) as the song, which is most suited to this museum, so I think there was something that reverberated between us.

Furthermore, there is a connection between the harbor city of Dundee in Northern Scotland, which was a base for trade between Great Britain and Asia, making it a city on the borderline between the West and the East. I was invited to participate in a competition for the design of the Scotland annex of the Victoria & Albert Museum, one of the most famous museums in Great Britain, which resulted in my design being selected. The opportunity to participate in and to win this competition arose from the favorable impression created in the minds of the judges who visited this museum on this borderline in Nagasaki, which is integrated with the water.

In this and various other ways, Nagasaki connects my past and present through the West and the East. These feelings have been further strengthened over the last 20 years as the museum has become a more integral part of the waterfront and is further appreciated by the people in this city.