On a weekday morning in late September, an hour and a half from Tokyo off a side-road near the town of Sakura, the ticket queue for the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art is long. Cars wait along a cedar-lined lane for a spot in the second overflow parking zone. The gift shop has been so overwhelmed by customers in recent days that management has shut its doors. By 11:45am, the digital screen outside the museum’s Belvedere Italian restaurant declares the waiting time for a table is now 181 minutes; a special notice on the website recommends bringing a packed lunch instead.

The museum has said it will close in early 2025, and thousands of art lovers, in their stampede to the Chiba countryside, can sense an emergency. Large parts of corporate Japan can sense something far, far more alarming.

The unfolding saga of this comparatively obscure museum — and of the hundreds of artworks owned by the listed chemicals company behind it — is also an unfolding saga of corporate Japan and what version of shareholder capitalism the country as a whole wants to subject itself to. A belated reckoning now looks to be rearing back up from the murky late 1980s, when banks encouraged Japanese company founders to borrow wildly against what were then soaring domestic real estate values.