Naoshima Turned a Declining Industrial Island Into Japan's Most Improbable Art Capital

Naoshima is a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, administratively part of Kagawa Prefecture, and until the early 1990s it was better known for a copper smelting works than for anything a visitor might travel to see. Its transformation began when the education and publishing company Benesse Holdings started developing an art site on the island's southern shore, working repeatedly with the architect Tadao Ando, whose spare, concrete buildings have since become as much a part of Naoshima's identity as the art they hold.

A museum built mostly underground

The centrepiece is the Chichu Art Museum, opened in 2004 and built almost entirely below ground so that the surrounding landscape stays visually undisturbed, lit largely by natural light channelled down through the structure. It holds a small, fixed set of works, including a room of Claude Monet's water lily paintings and site-specific installations by James Turrell and Walter De Maria, and Ando designed the building around each piece rather than the other way round, which is part of why the museum limits visitor numbers and asks people to move through it slowly.

The pumpkin on the pier

The island's most photographed object is a giant yellow pumpkin sculpture by Yayoi Kusama, sitting at the end of a small pier facing the sea, a companion to the artist's earlier polka-dot works on the island. The original was swept into the sea by a typhoon in 2021 and was replaced with a new casting in 2022, a small reminder that Naoshima's art is genuinely exposed to the weather rather than kept behind glass. Since 2010, Naoshima has also anchored the Setouchi Triennale, a contemporary art festival held roughly every three years across a dozen islands in the Seto Inland Sea, which has extended the same idea, art as a reason to visit otherwise overlooked places, well beyond Naoshima itself.

Traveller tips

• Naoshima is reached by ferry, most commonly from Uno Port near Okayama or from Takamatsu in Kagawa; there is no bridge or rail link to the island.
• The Chichu Art Museum and Benesse House Museum both cap daily visitor numbers and are worth booking or checking hours for in advance.
• A bicycle, available to rent near the main ferry ports, is the easiest way to move between the island's scattered art sites.
• The Setouchi Triennale runs across spring, summer and autumn sessions in its festival years; outside those years, the permanent museums and outdoor works remain open as usual.