The Mithila Museum sits in the rice country of Niigata, two hours by slow train from the Sea of Japan coast. It is winter when I arrive. The snow is waist-high against the wooden walls. Inside, there are four thousand paintings from a small district of northern Bihar, the largest collection of Mithila art outside of India.
Tokio Hasegawa opened this museum in 1982. He was then, and remains, the unlikeliest curator I know — a Japanese art student who went to Madhubani in the 1970s, stayed, and spent forty years putting a village art form on the wall of a country six thousand kilometres away.
We sit in a small office on the second floor with a thermos of green tea. He speaks Hindi with a Maithil accent. I speak Japanese with an Indian one. We agree, in both languages, that Sita Devi remains the greater artist.
The paintings are hung with the seriousness that Japanese museums reserve for their own national treasures. There are handlists in three languages. Schoolchildren come every Tuesday. A Madhubani painter from Jitwarpur is in residence for the winter; I find her working on a Kohbar in the hall, a young Japanese woman quietly copying her lines in a notebook beside her.
This is the long diplomacy of pigment — conducted not through speeches, but through the slow building of a room where the work may be properly seen. Bihar has not done as well by these painters as Niigata has. It is a sentence I find difficult to type.
On the train back to Tokyo I think about what the museum has cost Hasegawa, in the ordinary sense of a life. A marriage. A country. Forty winters in Niigata snow. And I think about what his obstinacy has bought — the longest, most patient gallery Madhubani has in the world.
A diplomacy conducted not through speeches, but through the slow building of a room where the work may be properly seen.