A museum dedicated to the first Western collector of Japanese art and culture, housed in the canal-side mansion where Philipp von Siebold lived after his return from Japan in the 1830s. The collection includes lacquerware, woodblock prints, ceramics, botanical specimens, and ethnographic objects that Siebold brought back from a country that was almost entirely closed to outsiders.
The museum is small and uncrowded — a welcome contrast to the major Japanese collections in London or Paris. The house itself is a handsome 17th-century building on the Rapenburg. Temporary exhibitions explore the ongoing cultural exchange between Japan and the Netherlands, a relationship that stretches back to the 17th century when the Dutch trading post at Dejima was Europe's only window into Japan.