Adachi Museum of Art

A local businessman built this museum in the 1970s around two obsessions: modern Japanese painting, especially the work of Yokoyama Taikan, and gardens. The gardens are the reason most people come, and the reason many are briefly confused, because you cannot enter them. They are composed to be seen from inside the building, through plate glass and through windows framed like hanging scrolls, with raked gravel, clipped pines, a moss garden and a dry waterfall arranged against the wooded hills behind, which were bought so the view would never change. Gardeners work the far slopes daily. It has held the top place in a specialist journal's annual ranking of Japanese gardens for many years running.

What you actually see

• The dry landscape garden - white gravel, pine and stone composed against borrowed hills that belong to the museum.
• The framed windows - openings cut and mounted so the garden reads as a hanging scroll or a painted screen.
• Yokoyama Taikan's paintings - a large holding of his work, rotated seasonally rather than shown all at once.
• The moss garden - the softest and least photographed of the sections, best after rain.

When to go

Every season is deliberately catered for: azaleas in spring, deep green in summer, maples in late autumn and snow on the gravel in winter, which is the composition the gardeners plan for. Mornings before the coaches are best. It opens daily, with slightly shorter winter hours, and the shuttle timetable is worth checking against your train.

Honest expectations

You look at the gardens and cannot walk in them, which some visitors find frustrating after the journey. Glass reflections defeat many photographs. Photography of the paintings is not permitted. The entrance fee is high for a regional museum, coach groups arrive in waves, and Yasugi is a long detour from anywhere on the main lines.

Nearby

Matsue Castle is about 40 minutes west and Izumo Taisha beyond it.