Museums make unreliable experiences for me. The idea of trudging around a vast building looking at a bunch of items seems like lazily assigned homework, especially at big ones like the Tokyo National Museum. I need a lot more context. One paragraph per gallery is not enough, nor is a little tag telling me what each item is or was. Perhaps I need to start booking tours at every museum I go to. I would feel much more engaged if I could ask questions and if I felt like I was understanding something.

At this museum, the exhibit I most enjoyed was the archaelogical one. It sketched the ancient history of Japan in twelves paragraphs posted one at a time in chronologic order around a big room full of ceramic pots and other ancient items that have been uncovered in the region. Most of my attention was absorbed by the information and only a little bit was given to the artifacts themselves. Remains of archaic civilizations are interesting, but they don’t make my imagination run wild. I need something to engage with mentally.

Before we went into the archaelogical exhibit, I spent most of the time on my phone. Not distracting myself, but pouring mental energy into reading people’s opinions on Reddit regarding whether Infinite Jest was worth reading. It was fun. It made me think. I also spent some time grumpily mulling over why I felt disinterested in the museum. Should I find this format engaging? Room after room of items displayed behind glass that I was supposed to examine silently for a few seconds each? And when I was finished, what coherent impression was I supposed to have cobbled from eyeing an assortment of tools and trinkets presented to me with minimal context?

I found myself speculating on the origin of museums themselves. Who made this format up? City planning and land zoning in America, for example, seem arbitrary and incompetently devised until you understand the cultural context they developed from. Certain rules and norms start making a lot more sense when you understand that many American cities followed the example set by New York and that New York’s infrastructure developed to accommodate white families living in the suburbs while working in the city. In that light, we start to see the murky reasons why transit infrastructure in American cities caters to cars first and why single family residential zoning is so common in North America. It is only due to the ongoing housing crises that American and Canadian cities have begun to loosen restrictions to allow buildings with multiple dwellings in these areas.

We must resist the impulse of assuming norms and rules make sense. Things are shaped by their history, and it is the material conditions of a particular place and time that set the mold. When the reasoning underpinning a design is not evident, and when the design seems counterproductive, there is probably a very good historical reason for it. A very good reason for why it happened, that is, not for why it should still be. I suspect there are very good reasons discoverable in the history of museums to explain why they are the way they are. Whatever the reasons, they are not evident to me now, and I suspect they are obsolete. I can imagine European aristocrats centuries ago Oohing and Ahhing at exotic artifacts taken from faraway worlds and imagining the fascinatingly horrid lives those savages lead. Perhaps for these folks simply gazing at objects plucked from the cultures that gave them their meaning was a thrill and a half, and perhaps it would be for me as well if I didn’t have access to computers, the internet, and international travel. But I think even if I lived back then I wouldn’t care much about the object itself. Or perhaps I would covet it as a trophy, a precious symbol of my status in the world. In that case I would make sure to keep it safe, still showing it off, yes, but in the safety of a glass box, alongside the rest of my collection.