Sayonara

My MA duties in Japan are now over and I am to be a tourist for two days. Time perhaps to reflect on the Japanese museum scene and compare it with the UK.

Diving straight into the clichés, Japanese museums are places of great contrast and variety. At one, impressive buildings with outstanding displays and facilities and at the same time charmingly eccentric and almost gauche in many respects. I came with the idea that this high tech country would have automation down to a fine art. In many areas it does - at the Edo-Tokyo Museum they have a system showing visitor numbers on a screen with income generated and a line graph comparing it with the previous day, which is updated instantly every time a visitor goes through the turnstiles.

Yet the museums are very human with a lot of personal interaction. Strangely, this is one of the most labour intensive nations I have ever seen. They never seem to use one museum staff member when three will do. The customer service is fantastic but sometimes overwhelming. I have finally got used to phalanxes of museum security guards at every turn who look a little Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army and insist on saluting me all the time.

Science gets a higher profile here than in the UK both in the displays but also in the very high number of science centres. They even have a National Museum of Emerging Science that has a former astronaut as its director. I have met a few museum directors who are complete space cadets in my time, but none, as far as I know, have actually been into orbit.

My speech in Tokyo yesterday was peppered with words like social inclusion and community and this left, mostly, blank faces. I understand that museums in Japan have not been asked to take on some of the more social agendas that we are used to but I realised why when I tried explaining the concept to some people and one of them replied ‘in Japan, everybody is middle class’.

Their museum structure is strikingly similar to ours with a range of local authority, independent and national museums, with quasi-independent status for the latter. Their scholarship and collections are superb but what they do not have is a well-developed fundraising side.

Despite having an eye-watering range of global companies in Japan there is little or no sponsorship aside from the national newspapers, which seem to have a stranglehold on such deals. As explained to me today, any funding from a big corporation to a museum would come from their ‘corporate social responsibility’ budget: charity, in other words, rather than marketing. The way to shock our museum colleagues in Japan is to tell them how many people work in the Tate’s fundraising department.

So, time to sign off. It is really encouraging to visit colleagues overseas, receive their hospitality, tell them how we do things and learn from them. It isn’t better or worse, it is simply variations on an old and inspiring theme.

Now, about this tourism thing – Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market is apparently unbelievable, but it says here that to see it at its best, I should be there at 5am...

Museumed out

I think we can safely say that I have seen my fair share of museums.

So for a museum, inside or out, to overcome my jaundiced world weariness, it must be something special. Do me a favour, before you carry on reading this, go and look at a picture of the Edo Tokyo Museum on their website.

There, see what I mean? It looks like the bastard offspring of a Triffid and a Power Ranger. It is, apparently, inspired by an old warehouse and is the same height as the old Edo Tower, long since destroyed. Both of which seem like pretty flimsy excuses for the building but, I have to say, it works.

It works inside as well. The ground floor has the usual lobby areas and space for a temporary exhibition, there are no public spaces on floors two, three or four and floor seven has the restaurant. So you might think, all this and only 2 floors for the permanent exhibition? Well yes, except they are both the size of aircraft hangers and almost totally open plan.

The museum covers the history of the city from the seventeenth century when it was called Edo through the change to the Meiji era (and the name Tokyo) in the mid-nineteenth century to 1964 when, rather oddly, it was decided Tokyo was a modern city as it hosted the Olympics.

There are a number of collections issues around this – the biggest being that there aren’t any to speak of. The museum was created from scratch in 1993 with no objects. In addition, Tokyo has suffered its fair share of natural and man-made disasters: endless fires, a huge earthquake in 1923 and carpet bombing by the Americans in 1944/5. So, the vast majority of the houses (usually wooden) and objects that would tell the story of the city have been laid to waste.

Usually, I get uneasy with the use of replicas but this is handled adroitly, combining real stuff, quality reproductions, state of the art IT and fantastic models. At huge expense, models of houses, townscapes and palaces explain the sense of the city more than endless displays of cooking pots and kimonos.

Apropos of nothing, one of the tours the hotel is trying to sell us guests is entitled Industrial Tokyo and features as its piece de resistance a tour of Japan Airlines maintenance depot. I am off to book my place now – there is bound to be a free commemorative spanner thrown in...

Budleigh Salterton circa 1957?

It was Tokyo’s Narita airport that did it. Polluting all the hi-tech wizardry that you would expect were rather naff signs handwritten on tatty A4 paper saying things like ‘non Japanese citezins (sic) this way’.

The staff at the National Science Museum further lowered my aesthetic expectations. The ‘researchers’ sheltered with their collections ten miles away and there were as many education and design departments as members of the Iraqi George Bush Appreciation Society. The entrance to the museum also seemed to suggest I was about to experience the design values of Budleigh Salterton Museum circa 1957.

But initial appearances can be misleading. I was confronted with stunning collections beautifully and imaginatively displayed. The current blockbuster is the Mummy exhibition, from the British Museum.

The museum, the equivalent of our Science Museum, Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens all rolled into one, manages to cover all aspects of science despite limited space, and is one of the national museums of Japan that operates under the same sort of governance as the UK national museums – nominally independent under the watching and interfering eye of the Department of Culture.

Japan has a cultural agency unlike the English MLA or Arts Council. The director general of the National Science Museum is the former head of the agency. So how would, say, the Science Museum or the Tate feel about our equivalents – Chris Batt and Peter Hewitt - taking the reins? Answers on a post card please...

Ahead of the game in Nagasaki

Nagasaki museums are trail blazers for museums in Japan. The local authority is the first to exploit new regulations that allow it to appoint a private company to run its museums. So the buildings and collections of the Art Museum and the Museum of History and Culture are owned by the prefecture (local authority) but a private company employs all the staff to fulfil a comprehensive 5 year contract.

Thus far (a year in), it seems to running well. Incidentally, one of the points made in the UK when such an arrangement is discussed is that there is no private sector to undertake this task but the Japanese company involved is a ‘display’ outfit. What odds on Event or Haley Sharpe running a UK museum in 10 years time?

The task of the company is, however, made easier by the fact that both institutions are housed into two stunning new buildings both opened in 2005. The scale of investment given the size of the city is stunning. Equally impressive is the international deals they have set up with the Prado in Madrid and the Ethnographic Museum in Leiden allowing them to exchange and display objects of the highest quality.

Nagasaki is a medium sized city that most of us would never have heard of if the Americans hadn’t raised it to the ground in 1945. Due to the terrain of the region some parts of the old city survive, but the city hasn’t forgotten the attack and has a museum mark the event. It handles a difficult subject with integrity, honesty and no real rancour. Tellingly the place concerned is called the Atomic Bomb Museum but all the locals call it the Peace Museum...

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I am in Japan at the invitation of the Japanese Association of Museums (JAM) to give a number of speeches including the keynote at its annual conference in Nagasaki. This is my first time in Japan and it is a real assault to the senses – not least not being able to understand 95% of the words I see or hear. But the first and most obvious contrasts are between the respective museums associations and our conferences.

Like a number of museums associations, JAM is going through difficult times. Despite Japan having twice the number of museums of the UK, JAM is very small, with only 4 staff. It has a new director (young blood – he is 73) but his post has to be only 3 days a week. The government has withdrawn its funding and JAM is facing a real crisis. It is in danger of losing the critical mass that enables it to trade as a business and provide a decent service for its members.

It serves as a timely reminder that our Museums Association’s independence gives it the freedom that allows it to prosper and ensures its status as the second biggest museums association in the world.

With our annual conference in Bournemouth fresh in my mind, it is interesting to compare and contrast the two events. Similarities are obvious to see in both the subject matter and the way the event is run but the differences are more interesting:

· it is organised and subsidised by the local city

· the conference fees are much cheaper than in the UK

· of the delegates, more than 90% are men

· they dress much smarter than we do

· they have only 350 delegates and seven trade stands

· at their main social event, as well as the usual warm white wine, they hand out tumblers of scotch

· they have no concurrent sessions

· they accord me a huge amount of respect – certainly more than I get from UK delegates and my own colleagues

The latter innovation is something that I am thinking of making compulsory for our 2007 conference in Glasgow…

Destination Japan

I will be flying out to Japan this week to make a keynote speech at the Japanese Museums Conference in Nagasaki, courtesy of the Japanese Museums Association. On my itinerary there are visits to the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture and the Nagasaki Prefecture Art Gallery.

I'm then flying to Tokyo, where I plan to visit the Edo Tokyo Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum, where I will be giving a speech to a number of Japanese museum professionals. I will also be meeting with the Cultural Agency, the Japanese equivalent of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and with representatives from the British Council in Japan.

I will be updating the blog this weekend, so you can read about my experiences in Japan here at the director's blog.

Cultural vandalism at Bury Council

Bury Metropolitan Borough Council has resigned its membership of the Museums Association.

Those of you at the Annual Conference and Exhibition in Bournemouth last month will know that the MA is taking a strong line against the council's decision to sell off a painting from its local art gallery to fund a hole in the council's finances.

You can read a piece that I wrote for The Guardian on the subject here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1941923,00.html