/ARTS WEEKLY/JAPAN: Museums Battle Recession, Pop Culture

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jan 20 2003 (IPS) - It is not just bankers and chief executive officers who are worried by Japan’s long recession. Artists, curators, art critics and academics are alarmed too – the government’s desperate efforts to boost the economy have pushed culture and the arts way down the agenda, they say, and it is hurting.

Japan’s art museums, which include world-famous names like the huge Tokyo National Museum that specialises in the country’s cultural treasures, are facing a serious cash crunch.

Private funding has dwindled too. In the profligate eighties, Japanese businessmen lavished money on art, and when in 1987 the Yasuda Insurance Company bought Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ for more than 36 million dollars the purchase rocked the global art market.

Those days are long gone. Yoko Niijima of the Japan Museum Association, said surveys show that every year, about 30 museums report bankruptcy. "The economic recession has hit Japan’s museums very badly," she said. "It’s a battle to keep going."

A look at the numbers confirms the gloomy outlook. The association reckons that from 1991 to 1996, museum budgets dropped 40 percent even though expenses rose. Worse, in April last year, the government directed that museum budgets be sustained by a combination of public and private funding, in a bid to control public spending.

The capital too is tightening the purse-strings: the Tokyo metropolitan government reported that funds for the city’s major museums dropped to 44 million dollars in 2002, from 50 million dollars the previous year.

Officials find themselves in a tough fix – they need visitors to justify to the government their requests for more funding, but to attract the visitors they need the money for innovations like themed exhibitions, lecture sessions and the use of digital technology.

And then there is the pop culture threat. "State-run museums are lucky if they can report 5,000 visitors each month," said Yuji Yamashita, an art critic.

"With Tokyo Disneyland reporting millions of visitors per year since its inauguration 20 years ago, the issue for bureaucrats is whether we should spend too much on unpopular museums." Tokyo Disneyland has reported 17 million visitors a year for the last 10 years.

There are more than 3,800 museums in Japan, including private and university ones. If individually-owned galleries are added to this number, experts estimate that the public has around 5,000 centres that can be visited. Niijima said that about 40 to 50 new museums, most of them small, are built annually in rural areas.

Who visits these? "The majority of museum-goers are middle-aged," explained Yamashita. "The younger generation is too busy working, and students prefer popular entertainment." Yet a demand by art lovers for a free museum day has been hanging fire for years.

Professor Yoshiaki Nishino, who is in charge of the University Museum, a project of the University of Tokyo, put it bluntly: "Japanese museums need a new image to survive."

The project aims to revitalise interest in supporting Japan’s museums, particularly from the private sector, and to help reinvent Japan’s cultural scene to make it comparable with that of countries in the European Union.

But this is far from easy. Ryuta Iwai, head of sales at Prox Company, which headhunts new artists, said the lack of private sponsors for the arts has contributed to the gloomy outlook. "During the bubble economy, the corporate sector was willing to spend on arts – not because businessmen thought it was an important part of peoples’ lives, but because they had so much money to spend. Now with falling profits, there is just no interest."

Niijima called this "a terrible situation". Experts say the state budgets for museums and culture are likely to be the lowest in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. For 2002, the cultural budget was 836 million dollars, of which museums and galleries were assigned 382 million. In contrast, the total budget for education was 58.6 billion dollars.

If greater and more involved private participation is what is being sought, the example of the Himalaya Art Museum does not offer much hope. Well known for its high-profile exhibitions, the museum in Nagoya, established in 1977 by the Himalaya Confectionery company, sold most of its masterpieces last year and is to close down soon.

In contrast, some 100,000 visitors stream into the Ramen Museum in Yokohama every month. Devoted to the much-loved noodle dish – and its umpteen varieties, some of which can be sampled on the spot – the museum was established in 1994 and continues to be hugely popular.

Then there is the Edo Museum, which averages a healthy 170,000 visitors a year – its focus is the popular culture of Japan in the 17th and 18th centuries.

These may be the models to follow for new Japanese museums, which tend to be smaller than usual and organised around one or two exhibitions. Visitors have responded, as they seem to prefer learning about and experiencing a particular theme.

Experts say that Japanese museums – whose exhibition halls were once laden with works by Western artists – have now begun to re-examine the country’s world-renowned Buddhist paintings and its own cultural treasures.

"The government has to improve its cultural image despite the economic recession," said Iwai.

If innovations from the embattled museums can bring the visitors back in, the momentum needs to be maintained. That is why Iwai wants to see more public funding for young artists – and points out that Japan "cannot be satisfied with being an economic power" alone.