The Miho Museum collection began with
Japanese art, including
Shinto and
Buddhist art,
paintings,
ceramics,
lacquerware and
tea ceremony utensils, collected by Mihoko Koyama for over 40 years. The collection consists of 3,000 pieces of Japanese and Oriental art, of which 250 to 300 are on display at any one time. Special exhibitions of Japanese art from the collection are held several times a year in the North Wing, and permanent exhibitions of other areas are held in the South Wing. As of March 2022, the museum owns six These included two
Buddhist statues, a Buddhist painting, a Buddhist scripture, a
quiver, and a tea bowl. In November 2022, the Japanese government announced the designation of three hanging scrolls in the museum's collection as Important Cultural Properties. This brings the total number of Important Cultural Properties in the museum's collection to nine. Two of the hanging scrolls were made by cutting out sections of the
Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga and reworking them into hanging scrolls. The other is a hanging scroll from the Masuda family's
Jigoku zoshi (
ja), which was cut out and reworked into hanging scrolls. The museum's collection also includes , a late masterpiece by
Itō Jakuchū, one of Japan's most popular painters. This work made headlines in Japan in 2008 when it was discovered in an old house in the
Hokuriku region. Elephant and Whale Screens by Ito Jakuchu (Miho Museum)L.jpg|,
Itō Jakuchū, 1796 Elephant and Whale Screens by Ito Jakuchu (Miho Museum)R.jpg|, Itō Jakuchū, 1796 Among the objects in the collection are more than 1,200 objects that appear to have been produced in Achaemenid Central Asia. Some scholars have claimed these objects are part of the
Oxus Treasure, lost shortly after its discovery in 1877 and rediscovered in
Afghanistan in 1993. The presence of a unique findspot for both the Miho acquisitions and the
British Museum's material, however, has been challenged. Many of the items in the collection were acquired in collaboration with the art dealer Noriyoshi Horiuchi over the course of just six years, and some have little or no known
provenance. In 2001 the museum acknowledged that a sixth-century statue of a
Bodhisattva in its collection was the same sculpture which had been stolen from a public garden in
Shandong province, China, in 1994, agreeing with the Chinese government to return it in 2007. At the time of the agreement, the Chinese government publicly stated that the museum had purchased the Buddha statue in good faith on the open market and had not committed any fraud. Highlights of the collections have been featured in traveling exhibitions at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1996, as well as the
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Vienna, Austria) in 1999. ==Architecture==