The Ito Jakuchu exhibition, which celebrates the 300-year anniversary of the birth of one of Japan’s most prominent mid-Edo painters, is currently sweeping the nation. The exhibition, which opened at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum on April 22, has become quite a phenomenon in Japan. As of May 10, over 200,000 people had already visited and news of long lines only stoked the flames. Lines became so long that the museum added an average wait-time clock on their website, which recently has been around 4 hours!
But if you don’t feel like waiting in lines longer than Disney Land rides, there are other ways to enjoy the work of Jakuchu. Japanese patisserie Chihiro Ogura, who runs a custom-made icing cookie shop called ANTOLPO, offers a creative and delicious alternative: Jakuchu Ito cookies.
As with all her other work, Ogura’s cookies capture the fine detail and color of Jakuchu’s birds – a common theme throughout the mid-1700s painter’s work. It was said that Jakuchu owned many chickens and roosters, and allowed them to roam freely in his yard as he observed and painted them. If you want, you can certainly wait in line for 4 hours – the museum does offer water stations to keep guests from collapsing from dehydration – or you can just eat some cookies.
Bonus tumblr post: some of our favorites from Chihiro Ogura’s collection of icing cookies!
