Photo/Illutration Items based on the design of a “Yohen Tenmoku” tea bowl are on sale at the Seikado Bunko Art Museum in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district on Dec 6, 2023. (Satoru Kamibayashi)

Museums are increasingly focusing on the development of original gift shop items that tie into their collections to boost revenue and raise public interest.

The Seikado Bunko Art Museum in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district is one such museum and has found resounding success.

One particular item in the museum’s collection has generated exceptional interest--“Tea bowl, Yohen Tenmoku, Jian ware,” a national treasure form China’s Southern Song Dynasty period (12th to 13th centuries).

The bowl features large and small mottled patterns that shine on its blue surface like twinkling stars in the night sky. The striking pattern is said to have been created by an accidental change in the glaze.

Across the world, only three such pieces exist in their complete form, and the Seikado Bunko Art Museum has one of the three.

The museum has focused on designing and selling goods with the mottled pattern of this tea bowl.

A Hawaiian shirt, priced at 39,600 yen ($250) and made of silk fabric hand-dyed by craftworkers of Kamedatomi Co., a Kyoto yuzen dyeing company that has been in business for more than a century, re-creates the luster of the mottled pattern.

It sold out immediately upon its release in 2023.

Including additional production, a total of 25 shirts were sold in a year, generating about 1 million yen for the museum.

A plush version of the tea bowl, priced at 5,800 yen, also became a huge success after it went viral online. The stuffed bowl was so popular that the production was temporarily delayed.

“Artworks cannot be taken home, but merchandise can," said Toshinobu Yasumura, museum director. "If the merchandise becomes a topic of conversation, the museum’s name recognition will increase, too.”

Yasumura also serves as the director of the Hokusai-kan Museum in Obuse, Nagano Prefecture.

There, the museum shop’s sales equal about 70 percent of the museum’s revenues from admission fees, making the shop a major source of revenue.

Yasumura said the Nagano museum focused on online sales of goods during the COVID-19 pandemic and sales increased ten-fold.

Every year, the museum sells about 30 yuzen Hawaiian and button-down shirts based on Katsushika Hokusai’s masterpiece, “Masculine Waves" for the ceiling of the Kanmachi festival float, which the ukiyo-e painter created in Obuse.

The shirts are priced at 20,000 yen or more.

The Tokyo National Museum first opened its shop in April 1990. The museum now has three shops spread over 490 square meters, all run by an independent organization.

These shops feature some of the largest selections of products of any museum in Japan, about 2,200 goods and 8,000 books.

Original products have been developed by taking advantage of the 120,000 or so items in the museum’s collection, which includes 89 national treasures and 649 important cultural properties.

Cookie tins featuring “Yatsuhashi Makie Raden Suzuribako,” a national treasure by Ogata Korin, have been particularly popular.

Koji Onishi, a secretary-general of the museum, said, “Visitors can enjoy the memory of their visit to the museum for a long time by decorating their rooms with the tin featuring the national treasure or using it as a container for their belongings.”

Natsumi Osawa, a writer and lover of “museum goods,” said, museum shops have increasingly generated revenue and served as public relations tools to increase visitor numbers through social media.

“The word-of-mouth effect through social media is significant and if museums can provide information about attractive merchandise on social media, it can lower the hurdle for people who don’t normally visit museums," she said. "They might say, ‘If I can buy this, I would like to go to the museum.’”

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