Japan's Public Art & Street Sculptures

About this book

Japan keeps a second national collection outdoors — on station plazas, breakwaters, castle parks and shopping streets. This complete guide covers 200 individual works: the bronze dog of Shibuya and the giant spider of Roppongi, Okamoto's Tower of the Sun and Kusama's Naoshima pumpkins, the peace monuments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, festival floats, sacred gates standing in the sea, preserved ships and locomotives, manga heroes in bronze and mascots that became civic monuments. Every entry follows the same four fields — where the work stands, its form and making, its story, and how to visit it with care — and closes with the official source to confirm before you go, because outdoor works change with restoration and city life. Organised in eight regional parts from Tokyo to Okinawa, this is the museum without walls, catalogued at last in a single volume.