Where to See Nanban Art: A Museum Directory

In short Nanban Art: The Japanese folding screens, export lacquer and Christian objects made during the century of Portuguese contact with Japan, survives in around 100 public collections, concentrated in Japan and Portugal, but present in many museums all around the world. This directory lists Nanban art by region, distinguishing recorded holdings from recorded displays.

Compiled in September 2026 from institutional collection records, museum notices and published scholarship. Holdings change slowly; displays change fast. Confirm with the institution before traveling.

Japan

The deepest concentration, and the two collections built specifically around nanban material — Kobe and Osaka — are both in Kansai, within an hour of each other.

Institution	City	What to look for	Evidence
Kobe City Museum	Kobe	The Ikenaga Hajime collection, the principal body of nanban painting in Japan: Kanō Naizen's arrival screens, an Important Cultural Property; a Hasegawa-school pair attributed on its pine-and-paulownia brushwork; the portrait of Francis Xavier that survived at Sendaiji village; Western equestrian figures; a major early-map holding.	Documented holding — museum collection database. A Naizen display ran 25 April to 14 June 2026 and has ended.
Namban Bunkakan	Osaka	A museum built entirely around nanban and Kirishitan material, founded by Kitamura Yoshirō in 1968: a screen pair attributed to Kanō Mitsunobu, a Mater Dolorosa, a Madonna and Child, a St Peter, maps, lacquer furniture, and a cross associated with Hosokawa Gracia.	Documented holding. Two published opening seasons only — 1 to 31 May and 1 to 30 November, closed Mondays within them: the tightest constraint in this directory. Individual attributions are reported, not confirmed object by object.
Sakai City Museum	Sakai	A pair of six-panel nanban screens showing Portuguese merchants and Jesuits.	Documented holding — city collection record.
Kyoto National Museum	Kyoto	The European-form chest HK 31, European-style Chest with Plant, Bird and Animal Designs in Mother-of-Pearl Inlay, and Christian export lacquer more widely.	Documented holding. Its export-lacquer exhibition history indicates the collection's depth, not what is installed.
Suntory Museum of Art	Tokyo	An Important Cultural Property screen pair attributed to Kanō Sanraku, set in an imagined foreign port, and a chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl and sharkskin in maki-e. Equestrian screens and a Christian retable are also reported here.	Documented holding — two object records. Display not established; ask for the exhibition checklist and name the works.
Tokyo National Museum	Tokyo	Christian shrines, export lacquer and Kirishitan material; a Three Saints, Marian paintings, Western-style genre scenes and books from the mission press are reported.	Documented relevance through a 2014 export-lacquer exhibition; the individual paintings and books are research leads. Reported room numbers conflict, so none is repeated here.
Idemitsu Museum of Arts	Tokyo	A 17th-century nanban screen pair.	Documented holding. Exhibition activity at the Marunouchi premises is suspended pending the new building; the digital records are the way in meanwhile.
Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture	Nagasaki	A nationally designated early-17th-century arrival screen, export lacquer, nanban tsuba, world maps, and the civic records of trade and persecution in the port at the edge of two worlds. Dejima, Siebold and Kawahara Keiga material carries the story past 1639.	Documented holding. The facsimile donated to the prefecture in 2025 reproduces the Cleveland screens and is not a transfer of originals; ask specifically which originals are installed.
Kyushu National Museum	Dazaifu	Chinese and European Ships, A48, attributed to Kanō Takanobu — a black European ship at a crowded Japanese port on one screen, white Chinese vessels at a Chinese port on the other, which places the Portuguese inside Asian trade. A Suruga-port image and a lacquer oratory are also reported.	Documented holding — national e-Museum record; the additional works need object-level confirmation.
Sendai City Museum	Sendai	The Keichō embassy archive of Hasekura Tsunenaga and Date Masamune: a 1615 portrait of Hasekura at prayer and Hasekura's Roman citizenship certificate are among the reported items. Diplomacy, not screens.	Documented collection. Portrait attribution and item-level designation need checking against individual records.

Further Japanese collections and heritage sites

All research leads: named in a catalog or institutional listing without object-level confirmation. The identifiers are here to make an inquiry possible, not to promise a display.

Institution or site	Reported material
Osaka Castle Museum — Osaka	A nanban screen pair dated 1596–1615.
Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Museum of the Imperial Collections — Tokyo	Arrival screens and world-map screens.
Kōsetsu Museum of Art — Kobe	Battle of Lepanto and World Map screens: European history and cartography reinterpreted in Japan.
Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum — Nagasaki	Christian letters, Marian objects, a Pietà and persecution material, attached to the martyrdoms of 1597.
National Museum of Japanese History — Sakura Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History — Yokohama Matsuoka Museum of Art — Tokyo	Catalog-reported nanban screens.
Mitsui Memorial Museum — Tokyo	A later, 18th-century screen: reception history rather than encounter.
Itsuō Art Museum / Hankyū Culture Foundation — Ikeda area	Reported screens, including the Misaki Church screen; check which institution actually holds what.
Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art Northern Culture Museum — Niigata Tenri Central Library Saitama Prefectural Museum of History and Folklore	Further screen leads, no matched object records.
MOA Museum of Art — Atami Fukuoka Art Museum — Fukuoka	Westerners Playing Music and Western Genre Scenes: Western-subject painting beyond the arrival scene.
Nagoya City Museum Gifu City Museum of History	Reported nanban oratories.
Kyoto University Museum University of Tokyo Ibaraki Municipal Cultural Properties Depository	Marian imagery and a Christ the Saviour painting; study access must be arranged individually.
Shimabara Castle Amakusa-area collections	Material relating to the rebellion of 1637–38 and fumi-e. Contextual heritage; not every object is a nanban artwork.
Tōshōdai-ji and Murō-ji — Nara Honsen-ji — Ishikawa Saien-ji — Aichi Daian-ji — Fukui	Temple-held screen leads. A catalog listing is not a visiting arrangement; access may be unavailable.

Portugal

The benchmark collections outside Japan. Art the ships brought home. Most collections center on Lisbon.

Institution	City	What to look for	Evidence
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga	Lisbon	Two benchmark screen pairs — the Naizen-sealed pair, inventory group 1640–1641 Mov, and a pair associated with Kanō Dōmi, 1638–1639 Mov — with related lacquer; a later screen is also recorded. Take artist, attribution and date from each pair's own record.	Documented holding, but closed for renovation from 29 September 2025, with no announced reopening at the time of compiling. Published opening hours were still displayed beside the closure notice; the closure is the later statement. Treat Lisbon's greatest nanban holding as contingent.
Museu do Oriente	Lisbon	Screens, contadores, oratories and other encounter objects in the permanent exhibition on the Portuguese presence in Asia, on the first floor, which names nanban material explicitly; a Kanō-school screen, FO/0633, and a lacquer oratory are identified within it.	Documented holding; permanent exhibition, though individual works rotate. The surrounding Luso-Asian collection is not all Japanese — do not read every object in these rooms as nanban.
Museu de São Roque	Lisbon	A nanban reliquary casket in its Jesuit setting. The museum's St Francis Xavier sculpture is a separate Portuguese work showing nanban influence, not a Japanese object.	Documented holding; installation needs confirming.
Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis	Porto	A Kanō-school screen pair, about 1600–1610, inventory 864–865 Mob MNSR: ship and disembarkation on the first screen, commerce and the Jesuit presence on the second, a silver chest among the cargo.	Documented holding — the museum's own, not a loan from Lisbon. Confirm whether both screens of the pair are installed.
Museu Quinta das Cruzes	Funchal, Madeira	Late-16th-century nanban writing furniture.	Documented holding — museum room guide and regional collection record.

Four further Portuguese research leads: the Museu de Artes Decorativas Portuguesas / Fundação Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva in Lisbon, several nanban oratories including inventory 1186, important for portable devotional objects; the Museu Nacional dos Coches in Lisbon, a lender to the 1981 Gulbenkian Arte Namban exhibition, which is collection history and not present display; the Museu do Caramulo, a reported Christian painting without an object record; and the Santa Casa da Misericórdia at Sardoal, a reported lacquer oratory with a Marian painting.

Britain

Lacquer rather than screens, with one major screen at the V&A and two country-house collections that need a day of their own.

Institution	City	What to look for	Evidence
Victoria and Albert Museum	London	The Portuguese-arrival screen 803-1892, dated 1600–30; nanban cabinet W.100-1922, about 1600; export lacquer; European furniture built around Japanese lacquer panels. A shell-faced coffer on a European stand puts original and later components in one object.	Documented holdings — museum records and two museum essays. General references to the Toshiba Gallery do not confirm any particular object's display.
British Museum	London	Nanban chest 1956,0215.1. A second chest, 1912,1012.20, carrying literary and legendary imagery, is a different object and a different reference.	Documented holdings. A Gallery 93 display was recorded for the museum's nanban chest, but that record is a snapshot and the surviving accounts differ over which of the two chests it describes — so it is reported, not established, for either.
Ashmolean Museum	Oxford	The nanban-style lacquered coffer EA1985.53, about 1600 — wood, lacquer, pearl shell and shagreen, gilded metal fittings — and a floral cabinet. A lacquer gunpowder flask depicting Portuguese figures is also reported.	Documented holding for the coffer; the flask is a research lead. Reserve access is by agreed appointment only.
Chiddingstone Castle	Kent	Nanban lacquer in Denys Eyre Bower's collection, including a miniature coffer.	Documented holding. The published 2026 season ran Thursday to Sunday, 12 March to 1 November, subject to private-event closures.
Chirk Castle	Wrexham, Wales	A domed nanban chest in lacquer and shagreen, about 1600, National Trust 1170737.1.	Documented holding. Establish room access before traveling.

Continental Europe beyond Portugal

Mostly lacquer in princely and royal collections, with a handful of screens. Spain is unusual in that much of its lacquer stayed in religious houses and is still there.

Institution	City	What to look for	Evidence
Rijksmuseum	Amsterdam	The Portuguese-arrival screen pair AK-RAK-1968-1-A/B, about 1600–1625: merchandise unloading at one end, the captain under a parasol at the other. Early-Edo export lacquer too, including a chest acquired in 2013.	Documented holding. No gallery location established. Keep the later export chest distinct from the screens.
Kunsthistorisches Museum	Vienna	A nanban lacquer casket, also cataloged as a table cabinet, Kunstkammer 5421, first quarter of the 17th century: pine, lacquer painting, mother-of-pearl inlay, gilded bronze.	Documented holding, recorded in Kunstkammer Room XXV. Do not conflate it with the separately cited Ambras material.
Musée Guimet	Paris	A Portuguese-arrival screen; an oratory, MA5015, is additionally identified.	Screen relevance supported by published catalog and heritage documentation; the oratory identifier is a research lead. Ask about both by number.
Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales	Madrid	Japanese nanban lacquer preserved in a royal devotional collection.	Documented holding through the royal collections' furniture records. Whether the relevant rooms fall on the visitor route is a separate question, and often the answer is no.
Real Monasterio de la Encarnación	Madrid	Related nanban lacquer in a second royal monastery.	Documented holding, same source.
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas	Madrid	A nanban altar, CE27272, and a substantial export-lacquer holding; the museum's 2013 nanban exhibition catalog remains the route into the Spanish material.	Documented holding — national collections database.
Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art	Vitoria-Gasteiz	A Japanese lacquer casket.	Documented holding — Basque museum-network record.
Museum of King Jan III's Palace at Wilanów	Warsaw	A nanban table, with a published account of its conservation.	Documented holding. Confirm its current location with the museum.
LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur	Münster	A nanban cabinet of about 1620, late nanban style, from the former Museum für Lackkunst.	Documented holding since the 2024 transfer. The Museum für Lackkunst has closed and its collection moved here; redirect any listing under the former name.

Further continental collections and religious houses

All research leads, kept because the names and identifiers make an inquiry possible.

Location	Lead and qualification
Museum für Asiatische Kunst — Berlin	A Portuguese in Japan screen pair is listed.
Chiesa del Gesù — Rome	Early-17th-century paintings of Nagasaki and of Jesuit martyrs: a European devotional record of the mission, not necessarily Japanese-made objects.
Galleria Parmeggiani — Reggio Emilia	Dance in Honour of the Foreigners, 19th century: reception history, not an encounter object.
Schloss Ambras — Innsbruck	An early Japanese export cabinet with historic collecting documentation, distinct from Kunstkammer 5421 in Vienna. A reported inventory of about 1607 needs checking against the record itself.
Real Armería — Madrid	A kabuto associated with the Tenshō embassy and Philip II; presentation date and attribution unverified.
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao Museo Cerralbo — Madrid	Further lacquer and historic-collection leads.
Trinitarias Descalzas — Madrid Corpus Christi — Murcia San Antolín — Medina del Campo Santa María de Jesús — Seville Guadalupe monastery — Cáceres	Nanban lacquer reported in devotional or reliquary use. Confirm custody and access case by case: these are working religious houses first.
Sacred-art museum — Lourenzá diocesan museum — Pamplona San Esteban — Salamanca Ayuntamiento — Tudela	Reported chests, and at Tudela a lectern. Yayoi Kawamura's work on Spanish religious collections is the route into this group.
National Museum of Denmark — Copenhagen	An export-lacquer lead through Martha Boyer's 1959 collection study.

The United States

Strong in both screens and lacquer, and the clearest case in this directory of holdings that are documented and objects that are in storage. Plan around accession numbers, not institutions.

Institution	City	What to look for	Evidence
Metropolitan Museum of Art	New York	Nanban Coffer with Animals and Landscapes, 2016.508; Nanban Cabinet with Drawers; further boxes and coffers. Two objects show the afterlife rather than the encounter: the Mechanical table à la Bourgogne, 1982.60.60, by René Dubois, about 1760, oak veneered with Japanese nanban lacquer; and Foreign Merchants in Japanese Trade Port, 57.98, an early-19th-century reinterpretation rather than a record.	Documented holdings. Recorded in September 2026: coffer, cabinet and later screen not on view; the French table in Gallery 539. Several further numbers circulate for Met objects that are not accession numbers; check any number against the museum's own record.
LACMA	Los Angeles	Nanban Coffer-Shaped Chest, about the 1630s, M.90.71.8; Nanban Chest with Circular Motifs, M.90.99.6a-i; Nanban Chest with Design of Fans, M.90.71.5a-b. The strength is lacquer; the museum's Latin American holdings are a separate comparative field.	Documented holdings. Recorded in September 2026: the coffer-shaped chest on view in the David Geffen Galleries, in a Dutch-collecting context; the other two not on view.
Cleveland Museum of Art	Cleveland	Arrival of the "Southern Barbarians", the pair 1960.193.1–2, about 1600.	Documented holding; recorded as not on view. A 2025–26 installation ended in June 2026. This is the pair reproduced as a facsimile for Nagasaki in 2025 — the originals did not move.
National Museum of Asian Art, Freer collection	Washington, DC	Southern Barbarians in Japan, F1965.22–23.	Documented holding; the archived record says not on view. Check the current collection portal rather than the archived page.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art	Kansas City	European-form Coffer, F85-14/8.	Documented holding; recorded as not on view. A useful smaller-scale lacquer comparison.

Further North American screen collections

All research leads at catalog level: named works with identifiers, no display confirmation.

Institution	Reported work or scope
Peabody Essex Museum — Salem	A nanban oratory and arrival screens; E200727 is given for a screen, and a shrine is attributed to Giovanni Niccolò's school, about 1597.
Art Institute of Chicago	Southern Barbarians, 1965.401, reported as a 17th-century pair.
Museum of Fine Arts — Boston	Several screens, including Southern Barbarian Boat works; identifiers 49.3 and 19.122 are reported.
Asian Art Museum — San Francisco	Arrival of a Portuguese Ship, the pair B60D77/B60D78, dated 1620–1640.
Portland Art Museum — Oregon	A Kanō-school pair, 64.13A,B, gift of Margery Hoffman Smith; the representation of foreign women is worth examining.
Dayton Art Institute — Ohio	A nanban screen; no matching object identifier.

Singapore

Institution	City	What to look for	Evidence
Asian Civilisations Museum	Singapore	A Japanese shrine with the Holy Family and John the Baptist, 2016-00368, in the Christian Art gallery.	Documented in the gallery's own printed guide, which establishes gallery context rather than a dated installation.

Latin America and the wider afterlife

The Manila–Acapulco route carried Asian luxury goods into New Spain, and the Japanese folding screen contributed to the history of the Mexican biombo; imported lacquer and shell decoration belong in any comparison with enconchados, paintings worked with mother-of-pearl. Two cautions for the galleries: Mexican maque has its own local history and is not a transplanted Japanese invention, and visual resemblance is not proof of a single line of transmission. Every holding below is a research lead.

Institution	Reported material and distinction
Museo Franz Mayer — Mexico City	Biombos and shell-inlaid works; Juan Correa's Four Elements and Liberal Arts and a conquest screen are named.
Museo Soumaya — Mexico City	A Conquest of Mexico screen dated 1683–1687, attribution to Pedro Villegas provisional.
Museo Nacional de Historia, Chapultepec — Mexico City	A further conquest-screen lead.
Foro Valparaíso / Fomento Cultural Banamex — Mexico City	Another conquest-screen lead; custody unverified.
Museo de América — Madrid	New Spanish enconchado painting: comparative, not a Japanese screen collection.
Brooklyn Museum — New York	Folding Screen with the Siege of Belgrade and Hunting Scene, about 1697–1701: a Mexican work combining the folding-screen format, shell decoration and a European subject.

Further Information

The screen corpus is better published than it is exhibited.

The census. Mitsuru Sakamoto and collaborators, Nanban Byōbu Shūsei / A Catalogue Raisonné of the Namban Screens (2008), with Alexandra Curvelo's Nanban Folding Screen Masterpieces (2015) as the accessible introduction.

Lacquer. Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg, Japanese Export Lacquer, 1580–1850; Maria Helena Mendes Pinto's work on screens and lacquer, including Namban Lacquerware in Portugal: The Portuguese Presence in Japan (1543–1639) (1990). Verify the edition: publication dates and translated titles vary between records for both.

Mission, and the wider frame. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773; the Madrid catalog Lacas Namban: Huellas de Japón en España (2013); Yayoi Kawamura on Spanish religious collections, the route into the convent holdings above; Okamoto Yoshitomo, The Namban Art of Japan (1972), the foundational English survey; C. R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon (1959), for maritime context; Rodrigo Rivero Lake, El arte namban en el México virreinal (2005), for the trans-Pacific one; and After the Barbarians II (2008), with Teresa Canepa's introduction and entries, cataloging 48 works across the Japanese, Portuguese and Dutch markets. More in the site's annotated bibliography.

Collections worth searching directly. Kobe City Museum's collection database and published catalogs; Japan's national e-Museum, for designated cultural properties at high resolution; RAIZ for Portuguese museum collections and CER.es for Spanish, both of which surface objects that never reach a museum's own front pages; Museotik for Basque collections; Japan Search for vocabulary. The Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga's online story on its own screens substitutes for the closed galleries.

When searching for Nanban art, search under both Nanban and Namban, and add lacquer coffer, Christian shrine, Portuguese export, contador, escritório, arca, baú and biombo; "Southern Barbarians" is particularly productive in American museum databases. Auction catalogs stay online long after the sale, and are a real comparative archive for objects that have otherwise vanished into private hands.

Technique and attribution. TOBUNKEN, Japan's national research institute for cultural properties, publishes technical studies of overseas lacquer and Christian objects; the Getty Conservation Institute's RADICAL project is the other route into lacquer analysis. Read construction, imaging and provenance together — no single chemical marker proves a Kyoto or a Nagasaki workshop on its own. TOBUNKEN is an independent institution, not a department of the Tokyo National Museum, which is worth knowing before writing to either.