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...