Kathryn Hunyor, a cultural officer at the Australian Embassy in Tokyo, says the closure of the museum would be a tragedy. 'It's a very important part of Japan's international cultural heritage,' she says.

The museum's supporters have gathered 16,000 signatures protesting against the plans, but the economic facts are undeniable. With a population of 90,000, Ashiya City pumps 140 million yen (about HK$10 million) a year into the institution. Its mayor, Ken Yamanaka, says he doesn't want to shut it, but his council is struggling to balance falling tax revenues with rising health and welfare expenses, and claw money back from 'non-essentials' such as culture.

With fewer than 4,000 visitors a year paying about 160-300 yen each, the museum is hardly self-sufficient. 'The council is cutting education and welfare as well as [its] cultural provision, so we know it's not just us, and we accept that they have to save money. But that doesn't make it any easier to bear,' Kawasaki says.

Ashiya's problems have been compounded by the costs of rebuilding much of the city after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, but many local councils are feeling the pinch as the Japanese central government cuts public spending. Many museums and galleries that were planned or built during the 1980s, are struggling in lean times. Japan's Diet this summer approved the conversion of all the nation's state-run universities and the National Museum of Japanese History into independent corporations employing 120,000 formerly state-paid staff.

Reiko Tomii, a US-based independent scholar and campaigner for the Ashiya City Museum, says its campaign 'may be a test case to determine the future of the whole museum system in Japan'.

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara recently set a precedent when he conducted an experiment with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoT) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (TMMP).

Unhappy about how much money the museums sucked out of the city's coffers, Ishihara slashed tax-based funding from 90 per cent to about 50 per cent of the total budget of the museums and appointed two businessmen to run them, and use their connections for sponsorships: Yoshiharu Fukuhara, a former-president of cosmetics firm Shiseido at the TMMP, and Hirotaro Higuchi, the former head of Asahi Breweries, at the MoT.

Japan is used to corporate involvement in culture and the arts. Tobacco companies sponsor many high art projects. Ryoichi Sasagawa, the late tycoon behind Japan's boat racing industry, founded one of the country's largest private cultural foundations. And Tokyo's top concert hall is named after a best-selling beer. But while the MoT and TMMP have thrived since their chiefs' appointments, some institutions such as Yokohama Art Museum have switched to foundation status and others sniff that the cost of business input has been the dumbing-down of content.

Museums can still attract the public, says Tomii, citing a recent MoT exhibition of models from Studio Ghibli, makers of the Oscar-winning animated film Spirited Away. Tickets for the event, which followed a Ferrari exhibition in February 2002, could be purchased only from Lawson's convenience stores. 'The government of Tokyo is actually very hostile to culture,' says Tomii. 'They've already closed the literature museum, and the governor keeps using the word 'burden' when describing the cost of funding museums. But they're not just elite institutions. They do a lot of work developing artists and offering workshops. They're needed in the same way education is needed.'

Kawasaki says that, although the local council would favour a mixture of sponsorship and private money for the Ashiya City Museum, that is going to be tough in Japan. 'Contributions to museums and galleries in the US are tax deductible, but we don't have that system here, and the recession means that few companies have money to support worthy causes,' he says. 'Japanese firms still give money to educational and cultural interests under the banner of contributing to society, but there are severe limits, so there would have to be big national changes before we could follow the US style.'

Tomii agrees. 'There is no culture or tradition of philanthropy in Japan,' she says. The Mori Art Museum (MAM) is a showcase for corporate support for the arts. Founded by the president of the Mori Building Company, Minoru Mori, the 32,000sqft museum at the top of the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, attracts thousands of tourists every month.

Corporate support can be fickle, however, as the Sezon Museum of Art discovered in 1999 when the Seibu Department Store pulled the sponsorship plug.

Hunyor says it is too early to tell whether corporate involvement in the arts has been a success. 'There's certainly room for better marketing,' she says. 'The trend was to put a lot of money into buildings, but not the contents. The close relationship between business and local government is worrying. When things get desperate, it will be interesting to see what the museums do for money.'

For more, see ww.ashiya-web.or.jp