The Poet Billionaire: Money for Art’s Sake

POST-WHATEVER with Ken Nishikawa · Oct 15, 2026 · 16m

This week on Post-Whatever, a story about the only billionaire I know of who spent his money on poetry, performance art and putting Jackson Pollock next to the trousers.

In 1987, the richest man on earth was Japanese, and so were five of the other top ten. His half-brother, Seiji Tsutsumi, was a department-store tycoon who wrote award-winning poetry under a pen name, turned a part of his department store into a museum of contemporary art and put roughly ten billion yen of his own money into a foundation for new artists. Then Japan's bubble burst. It's the rise and fall of a great patron of…