Tokyo Anthology: OctoberA tea bowl that crossed the sea, a hut of nine square metres, and a UFO that reads your brainwaves

Three galleries, from China to Japan to the Korean peninsula.

The Nezu Museum has chosen highlights from its 2,300 ceramics: Gallery 1 is China, Gallery 2 Japan, and Gallery 5 the Korean peninsula, so walking through is a journey across the sea. A Northern Song celadon ewer and basin from the Yue kilns, a five-colour vase from the Jingdezhen private kilns, hand-formed earthenware plates by Ogata Kenzan (brother of the Rinpa painter Ogata Kōrin), and a rare Joseon-era buncheong shrine with inlaid decoration are all here, and another gallery of celebrated tea ceramics includes the Important Cultural Property Ao-Ido tea bowl named Shibata.

The Edo that crossed the sea, back in Ueno from London.

For its 100th anniversary, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum brings in the Japanese collection of the British Museum, founded in 1753: some 40,000 objects, counted among the most comprehensive collections of Japanese art outside Japan. The show picks Edo-period screens, hanging scrolls, and handscrolls, and prints by eight ukiyo-e masters including Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai, and Hiroshige, and looks at how generations of collectors and curators carried the collection to London from the late-19th-century craze for Japonisme onward.

“They say robots are made to cut down on work. My robots are made to make more.”

The speaker, Nam June Paik (1932–2006), was born in Seoul, studied aesthetics in Japan and music in Germany, and in 1963 showed work in West Germany that founded what we now call media art. Galerie Watari, the forerunner of the Watari Museum, gave him a solo show, Tribute to John Cage, in 1978, the start of a long collaboration. Marking 20 years since his death, this exhibition borrows Jugemu, the rakugo story of a child given an absurdly long name to wish him a long life, as a figure for his work: the cathode-ray tubes may be obsolete, but the work is meant to live on and on. TV Egg (1982) and Cage Forest / Forest Revelation (1993), which sets plants among 20 monitors, are on show.

Light as the material of sculpture.

Minami Tada (1924–2014) made some 200 sculptures and 500 architectural works in her lifetime, for parks, stations, city halls, hotels, and theatres; the light walls of the Imperial Hotel and the lighting of the new Imperial Palace are hers. In the years of rapid economic growth she was among the first to bring industrial materials such as stainless steel, acrylic, and glass into art, making the reflection, transmission, and shimmer of light the heart of her work. This first major retrospective since her death shows about 70 works with architectural parts and sketches, and rebuilds at full size her lost 1963 chandelier, the Chain-delier, made from the ball chain you find on sink plugs.

A face painted by Leonardo, in Japan for the first time.

The National Art Center, Tokyo has chosen more than 50 Renaissance works from the Louvre's collection, across painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and decorative arts. The centrepiece, in Japan for the first time, is Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of a Woman, known as La Belle Ferronnière: he painted not just how a face looks but the complex feelings behind it. Four themes drawn from Leonardo himself (travel, innovation in technique, the gaze back to antiquity, and the rise of portraiture) tie the Renaissance together.

All three great series laid out in full, if you come three times.

With the gift of 1,025 ukiyo-e prints collected by Uchiyama Susumu (1893–1980), the Tokyo National Museum holds its first full exhibition of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858). His three great series are shown complete across three periods: The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō until October 25, The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō from October 27, and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo from November 25, with every work changed between periods. The museum says showing all three series in full is without precedent in Japan or abroad.

A hut from eight hundred years ago, nine square metres.

In the early 13th century Kamo no Chōmei wrote Hōjōki (An Account of My Hut) about how to live in an impermanent world; his hut is long gone, but the essay is often called a true book of architecture. 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT has asked the architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto to direct a show in which architects, designers, artists, and companies each imagine their own hut at the scale of one jō square, about nine square metres; the participants include the sculptor Yoshihiro Suda and the painter Akira Yamaguchi. Rather than interpret the Hōjōki itself, the show asks how we might reweave our own lives today.

Marimekko's flowers bloom inside an Art Deco mansion.

Founded in 1951, Marimekko, whose name means 'Mari's dress', has released more than 3,500 print designs. The show brings over 60 dresses from the early years to today, with fabrics and archive material, including Maija Isola's Unikko of 1964; the art unit plaplax shows the Helsinki print factory in a video installation, and the designer Akira Minagawa of mina perhonen adds a new work in dialogue with Marimekko. The venue, the former residence of Prince Asaka, is a 1930s house built on French Art Deco, so the prints and the building's ornament answer each other. Entry is by timed reservation.

A tea bowl that crossed from Korea and became a Japanese National Treasure.

Daitokuji in Murasakino, Kyoto, was founded in 1326 by Shūhō Myōchō (Daitō Kokushi). Great monks followed, and emperors, warlords, and tea masters including Sen no Rikyū were devoted to it; Emperor Go-Daigo called it the finest Zen garden in the land. For the temple's 700th anniversary, treasures from the temple and its sub-temples that are normally closed to the public come out together, for the first time in 41 years and the first time ever in Tokyo. The lead image is the National Treasure Ōido tea bowl known as Kizaemon Ido, fired in the 16th century, in the Joseon era, in what is now South Gyeongsang Province in Korea, and now held by Kohōan in Kyoto.

Turner's steam and soot, in conversation with today's climate crisis.

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), often considered the greatest painter in British history, marked 250 years since his birth last year. He painted shifting light and air, raging seas and skies, and the steam and soot humans had begun to pour out in the Industrial Revolution, and has long stood for the sublime. The National Museum of Western Art has borrowed more than 80 oils and watercolours from Tate, home of the world's largest Turner collection, and sets postwar and contemporary works in every chapter: the Abstract Expressionists, Olafur Eliasson's melting-glacier series, and The Otolith Group's film looking back at colonialism and the slave trade.

The first major shojo manga exhibition at a national museum.

In the 1970s shojo manga, comics for girls, took a great leap forward, and Moto Hagio, Ryoko Yamagishi, and Waki Yamato were at its centre. For its 20th anniversary, the National Art Center, Tokyo traces all three careers from their early debuts to today, through colour illustrations, original pages of unforgettable scenes, and rare archive material. It is the first major shojo manga exhibition ever held at a national museum.

Step into a UFO that reads your brainwaves and joins your mind to a stranger's.

Mariko Mori became a star of her time in the mid-1990s with the Cyborg series, made with computer graphics; her interest then turned to Buddhist ideas of life, death, and the cosmos, and on to Oneness, a connection of all life from ancient time to the infinite universe. Organised with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, this is her first major solo show in Japan in 24 years, since Pure Land at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2002, with about 40 works from over 30 years. Her largest sculpture, Wave UFO (1999–2002), is a magatama-shaped pod: inside, your brainwaves and another visitor's become a single projected image (places for the experience are limited). The museum opens three smaller shows the same day, including one for Mari Katayama, winner of the Mori Art Award grand prize.