Image: Key visual for the exhibition ‘Animals & Monsters: Cute, Scary, and a Little Weird’, 2026, featuring towel-wearing nekomata cat spirits. Courtesy of the Ōta Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
The Ōta Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo is selling paid online access to its exhibition ‘Animals & Monsters: Cute, Scary, and a Little Weird’, published as an online exhibition on the Japanese platform note. Access costs ¥2,200, can be read on a computer or a smartphone, and does not expire once bought; images can be clicked to open at a larger size than a display case allows.
The online edition follows the exhibition at the museum's Harajuku building, which runs from 23 June to 23 August 2026 in two terms, 23 June to 20 July and 25 July to 23 August, with the entire selection replaced between them. The museum shows 140 works in total and states that 27 of them, about a fifth, are recent acquisitions being shown publicly for the first time. On-site admission is ¥1,200, ¥800 for university and high-school students, and free for visitors aged 15 and under; the museum takes cash only.
The online edition is structured in five chapters: animals of every kind, cute cats and frightening cats, frightening monsters, animals that imitate people, and characters that are simply "a little strange". The museum's introduction points to the cats and small chin lapdogs kept as pets, the foxes and cows of daily life, and the elephants and leopards brought to Japan late in the Edo period and exhibited as spectacles, alongside frightening figures such as oni and the spider-creature tsuchigumo. Its own summary of the physical show also groups the material around anthropomorphised animals and invented beings, among them the stone-bodied tiger tora-no-ko-ishi, human-faced fish and a single animal combining all twelve zodiac signs.
The free portion of the online exhibition covers the first chapter, ten works with commentary; the paywalled remainder runs to roughly 224 further images. Among the works discussed are Katsushika Hokusai's ‘Chin’ (1833), a long-haired lapdog given a red collar and a small handball, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi's ‘The First Koto Performance in the Inner Palace’ (1849-52), in which another chin sits on its own cushion among elegantly dressed women of the warrior class. Yōshū Chikanobu's ‘Jidai kagami’ (Mirror of the Ages), dated September 1896, shows a girl carrying a chin in a frilled bib. Kuniyoshi's ‘Famous Places in the Eastern Capital: Yanagibashi in Ryōgoku’ (c. 1832-33) sets against those pampered animals the ownerless town dogs of Edo, growling at one another as a geisha passes on a dark road.
Other entries include Ohara Koson's ‘Dancing Fox’ (c. 1905-12), a fox with a lotus leaf on its head and one leg raised; Utagawa Hiroshige's ‘Rabbits in the Moonlight’ (c. 1849-52); and Utagawa Kunisada, also known as Toyokuni III, in ‘Led by a Cow to Visit Zenkōji’, which illustrates the tale behind the proverb of the same name. The free chapter closes with an anonymous sheet read as satire of the Meiji Restoration and two prints of 1883 from a moral-instruction series, in which monkeys repay a rescuer and a bear dies holding a rock clear of its cub.
For anyone wanting to see the originals, only a few days are left. The museum's August closing days, 3, 10 and 17 August, have passed and it shuts from 24 to 31 August, so 23 August is the final day; the museum warns that weekends, public holidays and the closing days are heavily crowded and advises an early weekday visit. Opening hours are 10.30am to 5.30pm, with last entry at 5pm, and no timed-entry booking is required. The next exhibition, marking 50 years since the death of Torii Kotondo, runs from 1 to 27 September 2026.
Founded in 1980, the Ōta Memorial Museum of Art describes itself as a private museum specialising in ukiyo-e. It is at 1-10-10 Jingūmae, Shibuya, in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, holds a collection of about 15,000 works, and mounts no permanent display.
