The Japanese island that was saved by art

Shinichi Kobayashi has idyllic memories of his childhood on Naoshima, one of nearly 3,000 islands scattered across the Seto Sea in Japan.

“We would go and collect shellfish,” says the 75-year-old, who became the island’s mayor in 2018. “During the summer, I would spend the whole day swimming in the sea, collecting shells and fish, and I would get quite a tan.”

"I don't remember seeing any foreign visitors," he adds.

Kobayashi's home island is no longer off the tourist radar, thanks to the power of modern art.

Since the 1989 launch of what has become the Benesse Art Site Naoshima—a multi-island art project initiated by billionaire Sōichirō Fukutake—more than 500,000 people now visit Naoshima annually, whose fishing villages, rice fields, and rugged coastlines have become the canvas for mesmerizing art installations and ambitious museums.

The Setouchi Triennale was launched in 2010. The contemporary art festival — now one of Japan’s leading international art events — attracts around one million visitors to the region each season.

The sixth edition began on April 18 this year and will run until November 9, making it the longest Setouchi Triennale ever.

Forty years ago, few would have imagined such a transformation.

By the early 20th century, Naoshima had established its reputation as a copper smelting center, but by the 1980s it was heavily polluted. The virgin, rocky land around the Mitsubishi Materials plant was bare of vegetation.

The population declined dramatically as young people left in search of opportunities in larger cities.

Fukutake's father, publishing magnate Tetsuhiko Fukutake, and Naoshima's then-mayor Chikatsugu Miyake intended to revitalize the bleak area by establishing a children's camp. Tetsuhiko died before the project was completed, leaving it to his son.

Appalled by the pollution on Naoshima, young Fukutake bought a large area on the island’s run-down southern side. His plan: to transform the area by building attractive museums amid serene coastal views.

To realize his vision, he hired Osaka-born architect Tadao Andō, who had become known for designing buildings that blended seamlessly into their surroundings.

“I was surprised by the idea, and I thought it would be difficult to do,” Andō said in a 2018 interview, in which he and Fukutake discussed the project’s origins. “It was so inconvenient! Who would come here?”

"This project began as an act of resistance," Fukutake explained in the interview. "It was my conscious intention to build a kind of paradise on Earth — the first paradise that harmonizes art, nature and the local community."

In 1989, Andō designed the Naoshima International Camp, realizing Fukutake's father's vision. In 1992, he built Benesse House, a hotel and contemporary art museum that houses works by such luminaries as Bruce Nauman, Frank Stella, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The island’s transformation into a world-renowned open-air museum and international center for contemporary arts was all but assured in 1994, when Yayoi Kusama’s Yellow Pumpkin with Black Dots was added to the city’s growing collection of public landscape artworks. Since then, this iconic work has become emblematic of Naoshima itself.

“The initial goal was not to promote tourism,” says Soichiro Fukutake’s son, Hideaki, who now heads the Fukutake Foundation. “It was to revitalize the region through art and help locals feel a renewed sense of pride in their hometown.”

But the mission has not been just to build something new. Since 1998, and the start of the Art House Project in the nearby fishing village of Honmura, “using what exists to create what should be” has been a guiding principle, leading to many abandoned buildings on Naoshima and the neighboring islands of Teshima and Inujima being reborn as art.

Among them are two projects by artist Shinrō Ōtake: Haisha , a former dentist's building transformed with collage, recycled materials, and a giant partial copy of the Statue of Liberty; and Naoshima Bath "I♥︎湯" , a public bathhouse now decorated with a patchwork of patterned tiles on the facade, and a life-size sculpture of an elephant crashing through the dividing wall between the men's and women's bathing sections.

At first, some locals were skeptical about the general appeal of these works of art. In the 1980s, Toshio Hamaguchi worked for the Naoshima municipal government, and he guided executives from Fukutake's company around the island when the International Camp was being planned.

"I didn't expect that we would attract a lot of people with a project like this, and especially with art," recalls the retiree. "However, now we have a lot of visitors thanks to the art."

Since his first works on Naoshima, Andō has conceived nine other projects on the island, including the Chichu Art Museum, much of which was built directly into the land; and the New Naoshima Art Museum, which will showcase contemporary art from Japan and Asia.

The inaugural exhibition — titled From the Origin to the Future — will feature works by artists including Takashi Murakami and Makoto Aida from Japan, Cai Guo-Qiang from China and Do Ho Suh from Korea.

Like the Chichu Art Museum, the New Naoshima Art Museum blends seamlessly into its surroundings, with two of its three floors below ground. “It is one of the most ambitious and exciting projects we have ever undertaken,” says Hideaki Fukutake.

The success of Naoshima’s Benesse Art Site in attracting visitors to a once neglected location has been an inspiration for similar projects in other rural areas of Japan.

Art Base Momoshima on Momoshima Island is run by renowned conceptual artist Yukinori Yanagi, while on Ōmi-shima, another island, architect Toyō Itō created the Toyō Itō Architecture Museum.

As mayor, Kobayashi notes the economic benefits: "Thanks to the increasing number of visitors, inns and restaurants have flourished, helping to make daily life more vibrant for local residents."

"That said, we have also seen some changes, such as more people locking their doors, which was not common in the past... For me, the most important thing is that residents can live happily, vigorously and happily," he adds.

One threat is the island's persistent depopulation problem: Naoshima currently has 3,000 inhabitants, about half the number it had in the 1980s. "I personally strongly want to increase that number," Kobayashi said. "Even if it's just by one person."

But there are glimmers of hope; a 2024 report in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper noted that while the island's population was in decline in 2022, the number of new arrivals has increased slightly but steadily each year since then.

In the past five years, 500 people — mostly urban couples in their 30s and 40s — have moved to the island, drawn by its unique artistic beauty.

Many employees of Naoshima’s Benesse Art Site have relocated to the island, while others have arrived to work in the booming hospitality sector — so much so that Naoshima is now facing a housing shortage.

Mitsubishi Materials has also significantly cleaned up its copper smelting operations, improving overall quality of life.

Speaking at a conference on Naoshima in 2023, Eriko Ōsaka, a respected curator and director general of the National Art Center in Tokyo, credited the organizers of Naoshima's Benesse Art Site with changing the island's image "from negative to positive through the power of art."

In Ōsaka’s view, visitors to Naoshima “can experience serendipity that they can’t find anywhere else, and discover something unknown within themselves.” She says the success of Naoshima’s Benesse Art Site means that some of the island’s residents who have moved away “will come back one day.”

Read the full report (in English) on the BBC Travel website.