IT DOES NOT announce itself as a major building. In Ueno, at the northern end of old Tokyo, stands a relatively small concrete box, hoisted on slim columns. It is set off from the rest of the park by a wide gray plaza, demanding a solemn approach. As you near it, the flat expanse of the facade begins to differentiate itself into cladding panels, textured with pebbled aggregate. An off-center stairway juts out, a symbolic ascendance into a temple of art. This is the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, erected in 1959, and it is, incredibly enough, the only building to be designed by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known by his nom de plume “Le Corbusier,” in all of East Asia.

The austerity of its presentation hides special, humanizing characteristics in its interior such as a characteristically Corbusian ramp that ascends to the second-floor gallery space. Built to house the collection of an early 20th-century Japanese industrialist, with special strengths in late 19th-century French art, the National Museum of Western Art employed three local architects. Their names — Junzo Sakakura, Takamasa Yoshizaka and, above all, Kunio Maekawa — would become hallowed in the emerging pantheon of Japanese Modernists. They had trained with Le Corbusier in Paris, and they were early exponents of his ideas. In Japan, they all assumed a position of pre-eminence, their own acolytes cementing the hegemony of Modernism over other forms of Japanese architecture.

The story is not well known. To look at just a few standard accounts of Le Corbusier’s life and work — Kenneth Frampton’s “Le Corbusier: Architect of the Twentieth Century,” Charles Jencks’s “Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture” — is to search in vain for any reference to the building, or for any mention of the association between Le Corbusier and Japan. (The story of the building is well told, however, in Jonathan Reynolds’s pioneering study, “Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture,” as well as in Nicholas Fox Weber’s authoritative biography of Le Corbusier.) That the architect’s work in Japan is among his least known both occludes the extent of his influence and testifies, obliquely, to the enduring anxiety of Japanese Modernists, and Japanese architects more generally, over the scope of his project.