The fine arts Museum in Hakone was founded by Pola, a Japanese manufacturer of cosmetics. Besides the Museum, the group of companies Pola Orbis also founded in 1979, the Foundation of traditional Japanese culture, and in 1996 the Foundation for the arts. With the help of these organizations Pola Orbis engaged in the study and promotion of Japanese art.

Museum in Hakone has been built for two years and was opened in September 2002. Like many buildings of cultural and educational destination in Japan, the Museum was built as part of the symbiosis of man-made objects with nature of Hakone. The Museum is located in the forest area of the national Park Fuji-Hakone-Izu amid 300-year-old beech trees and is a fragment of the landscape. To minimise interference in the natural environment, most of the Museum premises has been placed under the earth.

The Museum collection includes 9,500 works of art that were collected for forty years Suzuki Tunesi – the owner of the Pola Group, now deceased. The collection of about 400 paintings by European artists, including the French Impressionists, and modern Japanese painters, who wrote Western-style. The Museum has three paintings by van Gogh, as well as paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Cezanne, Pablo Picasso. One of the Japanese authors, presented in the Museum is Tsuguharu Fujita, who was known in Europe under the name of Leonard, Fujita. It belongs to the so-called "Paris school". In 2013, the collector, whose name was not named, gave the Museum two previously unknown works of the master – canvas "Sirens" and "Grotesque". Tsuguharu Fujita in the early twentieth century moved from Japan to Paris, where he lived in the Bohemian quarter of Paris and was familiar with Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani. In his work he used the traditional technique of painting with ink and techniques of European paintings. Tsuguharu Fujita is one of the most expensive Japanese artists.