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Japan: Museums battle recession, pop
culture
By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO - 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 such
world-famous names as the huge Tokyo National Museum
that specializes in the country's cultural treasures,
are facing a serious cash crunch.
Private
funding has dwindled too. In the profligate 1980s,
Japanese businessmen lavished money on art, and when in
1987 the Yasuda Insurance Co bought Vincent van Gogh's
Sunflowers for more than US$36 million 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, last April 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 in 2002, from $50 million
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
such as 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 past 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 about 5,000
centers that can be visited. Niijima said that about
40-50 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 revitalize interest in supporting Japan's museums,
particularly from the private sector, and to help
reinvent Japan's cultural scene to make it comparable
with those of countries in the European Union.
But this is far from easy. Ryuta Iwai, head of
sales at Prox Co, 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
people's 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, of which
museums and galleries were assigned $382 million. In
contrast, the total budget for education was $58.6
billion.
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 organized 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.
(Inter Press
Service)
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