Kōjirō Matsukata

Early years

Born in Satsuma, Kagoshima, Matsukata was the third son of the early Meiji period Finance Minister and genrō, Matsukata Masayoshi who was also Japan's fourth prime minister.

Business career

After being educated in the United States at Rutgers Preparatory School and studying at Rutgers University (where he was a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity and a member of the freshman football team) Kōjirō Matsukata became president of Kawasaki Shipbuilding Company (Kawasaki Shōzō) in 1896. He then went on to become head of Kawasaki Dockyards from 1916 through 1923, which was the group's main company.

As such he led the expansion of shipbuilding activities, both commercial and military, and created various other businesses, including a major shipping line, Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha also known as K Line.

These companies progressively evolved into a major global engineering and industrial conglomerate, which ultimately took the name of Kawasaki Heavy Industries in 1969.

The financial success he enjoyed in the early part of the century was later affected adversely by economic downturns in the 1920s and 1930s; but much of his art collection remained intact despite the collapse of his business interests.

Art collecting

Matsukata lived in the United Kingdom in London at Queen Anne's Mansions from 1916 until November 1918 based in the Suzuki and Co. offices, he frequented the Japanese Club (Nihonjin Kai) where he met with artists, dealers and collectors in the Japanese community such as Sadajirō Yamanaka, Ishibashi Kazunori and Frank Brangwyn; first at Leicester Square and later Cavendish Square; where he spent £2000 to help remodel the club building in 1918. He owned over 220 of Brangwyn's works and they often met to discuss Japanese and European art.

Matsukata invested his significant personal fortune in the acquisition of several thousand examples of Western painting, sculpture and decorative arts. He collected these art works throughout Europe, largely in Paris. Matsukata bought the Rodin masterpiece, "Gates of Hell", which is currently to be seen at the Rodin Museum in Paris; and the sculptures on display in the NMWA entrance plaza were made from the same original molds. In the end, he hoped to see his collections in an art museum in Tokyo where visitors could come into direct contact with Western art, and he wanted the people of Tokyo to enjoy the same degree of easy access to great art which was available to Parisians. Named "Kyorakukan", it was designed by Frank Brangwyn in a modern architectural style for its time, which could have become the most important Western art museum in East Asia had it been built.

Matsukata is also famous for his collection of ukiyo-e woodblock prints which had been scattered throughout the world. The 1925 exhibition of the woodblock prints Matsukata collected abroad is thought to have been the first of its kind in Japan. Today about 8,000 ukiyo-e prints from the Matsukata collection are housed in the Tokyo National Museum.

Matsukata was well known as a good friend of Claude Monet. It has been reported that once, when Monet offered him the opportunity to buy whatever he wanted in the studio at Giverny, he purchased 18 paintings. His other artist friends included Frank Brangwyn, who assisted Matsukata in the acquisition of his collection. Brangwyn designed a gallery, the so-called Palace of Shared Pleasure, which Matsukata intended to build in Tokyo.

He had originally intended to bring all these artworks to Japan, but he balked at the 100% tax imposed on imports. Much of what was stored in Britain was destroyed by fires during World War II; and much of what remained in Japan was also destroyed by Allied bombing during the Pacific War. The combination of factors which kept so much of his collecting activities intact was only seen by the Japanese public for the first time in 1959 when they visited the museum he had envisaged.