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The Miho Museum () is an art museum located southeast of Kyoto, Japan, in the Shigaraki neighborhood of the city of Kōka, in Shiga Prefecture.
Since its opening in 1997, the museum has been run by the Shumei Cultural Foundation. Takeshi Umehara, a scholar of philosophy and religion, served as the museum's first director.
As of March 2022, the museum owns six of the more than 10,000 Important Cultural Properties of arts and crafts designated by the Japanese government. 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.
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, (1996). 9780870997730, Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 9780870997730 as well as the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Vienna, Austria) in 1999. (1999). 9783854970033, Skira; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. ISBN 9783854970033
Pei continued to make changes to the design of the galleries during construction as new pieces were acquired for the collection.
Pei had earlier designed the bell tower at Misono, the international headquarters and spiritual center of the Shumei organization. The bell tower can be seen from the windows of the museum.
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