Fine Art Takes a Loss.(art museums run upon hard times in Japan)(Brief Article)

When art lover Toshiko Sawano was in the old imperial capital of Kyoto two months ago, she had hoped to revisit the Seiho Takeuchi Memorial Museum. Its collection of delicate nihonga, or traditional Japanese- style paintings, by the early 20th-century master had impressed her a few years back. But when she called several times for the exhibition schedule, she got only a monotonous recording informing her that the museum was temporarily closed. In fact, the museum had permanently shut down. After the death of Shoin Umemura, a local hotel president and nihonga collector who owned the museum, the building was put up for auction at the Kyoto District Court last January. Sawano is heartbroken, but the demise of the Takeuchi museum is hardly unusual.

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, ...