Yakichiro Suma

Madrid/Nagasaki (Japón)

Yakichiro Suma

Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

Sculpture by Eva Aggerholm.

Yakichiro Summa, Ambassador of Japan. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

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Description

Yakichiro Suma (1892-1970) was born in Akita Prefecture, Japan, and graduated in law from Chuo University in 1919. That same year he joined the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thus beginning a career that would take him to important functions in Asia, Europe and America. In 1933 he was appointed Consul General in Nanjing, where he was to carry out a decisive mission: to try to incorporate China into the Japanese sphere of influence. He was then sent to the United States to become a counselor at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., and shortly thereafter became director of the Information Bureau of the Japanese Foreign Ministry (Lu, 2002).

In January 1941 Suma was appointed minister plenipotentiary to Spain, a position he would hold until the end of World War II (1945). Although his mission was mainly strategic, as he was responsible for the Tō espionage network, Suma stood out in Spain for his love of art. His artistic vocation was not merely diplomatic; he considered himself "more of an artist than a diplomat" (Altabella, 1942). He himself affirmed that "the most important thing in diplomacy is understanding. And art is the universal language that dispenses with the dictionary" (Suma, 1956).

During his stay in Spain he assembled an important collection of Spanish art, consisting of more than 2,000 pieces (Barberán, 1943) ranging from medieval sculptures to contemporary works. He acquired many of them directly from the artists or their heirs, as was the case with Fortuny, while others came from antique dealers, auctions and even flea markets such as the Rastro (Matsuda, 2008). In 1945, when he finished his work in Spain, he tried to export his entire collection, but his goods were blocked by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Part of his collection was deposited in Spanish museums such as the Cerralbo Museum, the Museum of Modern Art or the Museum of Romanticism, while other pieces were sold (Fernández Mercado, 2018). However, he obtained permits to export about 500 pieces, known as the Suma Fund, which are currently gathered in the Nagasaki Prefectural Museum of Art. Between the 1960s and 1970s, several traveling exhibitions were organized in Japan (Matsuda and Machida, 2017). However, despite the initial enthusiasm, the Suma collection was not without controversy. In the 1970s, several Japanese critics questioned the authenticity of some works, accusing Suma of having acquired fakes and of having acted without professional advice: "[...] it is the miserable result of the daring of a dogmatist who dared to arbitrarily collect artistic works without listening to opinions of reliable professionals" (Seki, 1970; Matsuda, 2008). The scandal, however, did not manage to overshadow the value of the collection, being today one of the most outstanding holdings of the Nagasaki Prefectural Museum of Art.