Isaumu Noguchi left behind dozens of works at his atelier on the Japanese island of Shikoku, many owned by the Noguchi Museum in New York, others inherited by his long-time protégé—and all at the heart of an ongoing debate about the future of the site.

To devotees of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, there is no place more magical than the island of Shikoku, overlooking Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. There, in the town of Mure, Noguchi created some of the most important pieces of his 60-year career, including works for several prominent American museums. But for every sculpture Noguchi shipped across the ocean, many more may have stayed where he made them. Which is why the Mure property (known as the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum Japan) has become an almost sacred site; visitors see scores of sculptures Noguchi couldn’t bear to part with, as well as works in progress and large stones that he hadn’t yet begun to sculpt, scattered about the property and arranged in a collection of pristine Japanese buildings.

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Establishing the second museum, on Shikoku, has been more of a challenge. The task has fallen mostly to Izumi, who began working with Noguchi in the 1960s, when the stonecutter was in his 20s, and became, in some ways, both a protégé and a mentor. Now 76 and white-haired, he is a sculptor, co-owner of his family’s stonecutting firm and keeper of the Noguchi flame in Japan. Recently, Izumi led a tour of the property, which includes the 18th-century merchant’s house that was moved to the site and rebuilt as Noguchi’s residence, as well as the former sake warehouse containing Noguchi’s studio. (The sculptor’s tools remain, as if he might return at any minute.) In both places, conversation assumed hushed tones. “When you talk to Izumi,” says Jenny Dixon, the longtime director of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, “you feel like you’re back in Isamu-land.”

But Isamu-land is not as tranquil these days as it ought to be. The Japanese museum sits on property that belongs to members of the Izumi family—some to Masatoshi himself, some to his nephew and some to the stonecutting firm. “It’s a crazy quilt,” says Dixon. And most of the finished works in Mure don’t belong to the museum (technically the Isamu Noguchi Foundation of Japan). Those Noguchis are the property of the New York foundation, headed by Dixon. Their presence in Mure, says Shoji Sadao, an 88-year-old architect who was one of Noguchi’s closest friends, “is that oxymoron, the permanent loan.”

The fact that the works sit on privately owned land makes Dixon and others nervous. The property—all or parts of it—could slip away from the Izumis, either through sale or foreclosure. If Dixon can’t protect the land, she feels an obligation to at least protect the artworks by labeling them as property of the New York foundation. That way, creditors would be on notice that liens against the land would not extend to the sculptures. “We suggested that, but it hasn’t been received very well,” says Dixon.