ABSTRACT
The first regional public art museum in Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (Tokyo-to Bijutsukan), was established in 1926, and made possible by the one million-yen donation of Kyushu entrepreneur, Sato Keitaro. The redbrick building was designed by the Professor of Architecture at Tokyo Art College, Okada Shinichiro, 1 in the Greco-Roman style, with a grand staircase and six Ionic columns leading to the main entrance (Figure 4.1). Despite its decisively Western appearance, this museum had a character quite distinct from its Western counterparts, which was later adopted in many other regional art museums in Japan: ‘emptiness’. The museum, in principle, did not hold any collections, did not employ curatorial staff, and totally relied on temporary exhibitions brought in by external organizations, including art groups and mass media companies. Thus, the first regional art museum in Japan was the first ‘empty museum’. As a consequence, the establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum has been criticized by Japanese museologists today as a precursor of the post-war phenomenon of empty museums. Kurata and Yakima write:
[The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum] had been a ‘rental gallery’ to let its gallery spaces to various art groups until the new building was completed in 1975. This fact had a great influence on the public art museums that were established later, and resulted in producing ‘art museums in the Japanese style’ as ‘art galleries’, not art museums as ‘genuine museums’. (Kurata and Yajima 1997: 261)
Such common observations imply the assumption that an art museum should be based on its own collection and permanent exhibits. Only with a collection and permanent exhibits could an institution be ‘genuine’ and true to a Western model; otherwise it is merely an art museum ‘in the Japanese style’ or an ‘art gallery’ Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Old Building (1926–1975) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315616056/23223f45-12c1-4ef2-a49d-c4fd14bb2424/content/fig4_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Photo: Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo. at best. These museologists blame the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum for the emptiness of other regional art museums, most of which were built in the 1970s and 1980s.