Japan's Lord of the Isles Puts Art Hoard on Show at Visionary Museum

There has always been treasure on Naoshima. It used to be copper, but the refining industry that once fuelled the local economy has shrunk, and with it, the island's population.

Now a very different commodity is bringing people back: art.

Turning this pretty island off the coast of Okayama, 435 miles south-west of Tokyo, into an international art centre is the unlikely vision of Soichiro Fukutake, an entrepreneur who has delved into his personal fortune to acquire works by David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Claude Monet.

Although the Japanese public is no stranger to western art, masterpieces including Picassos and Renoirs too often hang, unseen by most, in private collections. Most of the best western art on public display is in Tokyo.

But Naoshima, a five-hour trip by rail and ferry from the capital, is mounting a credible challenge for the attention of a new generation of Japanese art tourists. This month the latest phase in the art-island project of Mr Fukutake was completed with the opening of the Chichu art museum on Naoshima's south coast. Designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the museum is on three floors, concealed beneath a grassy mound.

Inside is a small collection of installations and oil paintings, including five from Monet's water-lily series.

A short drive away is Benesse House, a museum and hotel which opened in 1992 and which is home to 20th century works including Hockney's A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan, and Pollock's Black and White Polyptych.

Mr Fukutake, who rarely gives interviews, refuses to disclose the size of his investments in art, although he is known to have paid a billion yen for the southern half of the island in the late 1980s.

But his reticence evaporates when he talks about the Chichu museum, which he insists is an attempt to conjure the more leisurely, culture-filled days of pre-industrial Japan. "I want people to feel the environment around them when they are here. They should be given time to pause and think, and art is a way for them to do that," he said.

Each exhibition room in the museum is tailor-made for individual works. The five Monet paintings, for example, hang on creamy white walls made from the plaster that was used in old Japanese castles. The floor is covered with 700,000 cubes of Italian marble. Stretching across an entire wall is Monet's Water-Lily Pond (1915-1926), which Mr Fukutake bought after seeing it at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1998.

Another dominant presence is Walter De Maria's 2004 installation Time/Timeless/No Time, a highly polished granite sphere which took 18 months to complete. Gilded wood hangs on the surrounding walls, giving the room the feel of a new-age Shinto shrine.

Mr Fukutake, 58, has other ambitions for the islands of the Seto inland sea, many of which are underpopulated and accessible only by patchy ferry services. The businessman, who owns an international chain of English-language schools, hopes to open a museum on Inujima - which he also owns - and then tackle the aesthetic wasteland of Teshima, for years an illegal dump for industrial waste.

There is every chance he will succeed. The number of visitors to Naoshima has risen steadily in the past decade, and his collaboration with Ando and contemporary artists around the globe has placed his "art space" mission firmly in the minds of the cultural cognoscenti. However, there are signs that art appreciation and tourism still have differences to resolve.

No photographs can be taken and visitors hoping to take notes are asked to put their ballpoints away and use specially provided pencils lest they suddenly get the urge to try their hand at graffiti.

There are conservative limits on the number of people allowed into the galleries at one time, and the marketing campaign, though professional, smacks of elitism. Chichu has not, for instance, approached large travel agencies or advertised itself at the mainland ferry terminal. "People will find out about it," said the museum's curator, Kayo Tokuda.