One good point about public museums in Japan having "funding issues" is that rather than pulling in the art that the public really wants to see and turning themselves into virtual Musee d'Orsays or ersatz Guggenheims, they instead focus on more academically valuable and locally relevant work.
A good example of this is the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), which, since a major van Gogh exhibition in 2005 -- that allowed most people to intimately study the back of each others' heads -- has dedicated its main exhibitions to worthy modern Japanese painters like Kunitato Suda, EI-KYU and Kokei Kobayashi. MOMAT's present exhibition continues this trend by celebrating the centenary of Ai-Mitsu, an important but still comparatively unknown Japanese artist from the early 20th century.
"One of the reasons he is not generally known is that he has more of a cult popularity, while the general public tends to find his works grotesque," points out Shogo Otani, one of the exhibition's curators. "With this exhibition, I hope when people take a closer look they will discover his attractive points."