A local universal modernity: World-Heritagizing Le Corbusier's building for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo

This chapter analyzes the decade-long process of having Le Corbusier’s building for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The 1959 building was part of a French tri-continental serial nomination involving buildings by the renowned architect in seven different countries. After its first inception in 2007, the initiative failed twice before finally obtaining UNESCO inscription in 2016. Before the French initiative, the Japanese authorities had yet to designate Le Corbusier’s building as an important cultural property. However, over the ensuing decade, the building took on new meaning to the Japanese public as government and local agents vigorously pursued its World Heritage inscription. The Japanese authorities originally founded the museum in response to French-government preconditions for returning the renowned Matsukata collection to Japanese ownership after the Second World War. The building’s world-heritagization reveals the emergence and consolidation of a paradoxical double symbolism: on the one hand, Le Corbusier’s building has become internationally acknowledged and heritagized as a testament to a universal global modernity while, on the other hand, it has achieved local recognition as a symbol of an innate national capacity for localization and for Japan’s post-war reconstruction and peaceful democratic national identity.