In post-bubble Japan, fine-art museums are an endangered species. That’s because their fate is often inextricably bound to the companies and millionaires who founded them. Accountants have always advised wealthy Japanese businessmen to build small museums as tax shelters. (With their nonprofit status, museums can help families avoid massive inheritance taxes on pricey art.) Companies were also thought to benefit from museums and in-house galleries, which could help raise their profile and grant them a veneer of sophistication.
It no longer works that way. A drop in visitors, combined with the financial woes of the owners or their companies, have pushed dozens of Japan’s numerous small museums out of business. In the past decade, more than 80 across the country have been forced to close down–a dozen in the past year alone. “There is no museum in Japan that doesn’t have financial problems,” says Tokyo art critic Shinichi Segi.
Among the most visible victims were department-store museums–uniquely Japanese venues where art is curated and exhibited, but not sold. The Sezon Museum of Art, which was located in Tokyo’s Seibu Department Store, shut down in February 1999 to the horror of many museumgoers. Opened in 1975, Seibu’s in-store museum was the oldest and the most respected in the country because of its ambitious shows, featuring such contemporary masters as Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys. Seibu generated so much positive publicity with the museum that other major stores followed suit. Soon, department-store museums were outpacing publicly funded ones in popularity. (Hey, where else can you contemplate art and pick up socks at the same time?) But with the recession, pressure mounted to give up non-money-making divisions.
A string of closures has ensued. The museum inside Tobu Department Store in Tokyo, praised for crowd-pleasing shows like Renoir’s paintings and early Buddhist sculpture, was turned into a traditional crafts shop in March of last year. Event halls have recently replaced the museums inside the Odakyu and Isetan stores. Museum officials say the real loss is to the consumer, since store museums helped make art accessible to the public.
Divesting themselves of their art isn’t necessarily a solution for struggling collectors and companies, either. Organizations with a nonprofit status are technically prohibited from selling off their property. The government, however, has quietly granted many museums permission to do so. The Manno Art Museum in Osaka, famous for the late shipping businessman Yasuaki Manno’s vast collection of Japanese and Chinese antiquities, sold 150 items at Christie’s London in June 2001. Kazunori Iwase, president of Christie’s Japan, says the regulations are anachronistic. “They were made on the assumption that the Japanese economy will continue to grow forever and museums will never face financial trouble,” he says. Many experts believe that, like their American counterparts, museums should be able to sell their treasures to shore up their collections and stay competitive. But buying from one another won’t save them. In order to stay alive, their founders need to revive their respective businesses. At this point, only commerce can rescue Japan’s art.
