Tarō Okamoto: The Shaman Hidden Inside an Artist

What I’m about to write, perhaps I shouldn’t write at all.

Kawasaki City, Tama Ward, Kanagawa Prefecture.

From the south exit of Mukōgaoka-Yūen Station, head toward Ikuta Ryokuchi Park — about twenty minutes on foot. You walk into the hills, deeper and deeper through the thick trees, and then, suddenly, the view opens up.

And you see it.

A massive white tower. Thirty meters high.

Tower of the Mother.

This is a prayer — offered by the greatest ritualist of twentieth-century Japan, Tarō Okamoto, to his mother, the writer Kanoko Okamoto.

“It is not merely a work of art,” Okamoto himself said.

He was not merely an artist.

He was a modern shaman, hidden inside an artist.

Almost no one in Japan has noticed this.

What follows is the story of that man.

A man who swallowed the Jōmon, the atomic bomb, Mexico, Kabbalah, Mircea Eliade, the shamans of Okinawa, and his own mother — all of it — into himself, and then hurled it back out as colossal works of art.

“Art is an explosion.”

For many Japanese, Tarō Okamoto is the strange old man from a TV commercial, twisting his face into a grotesque shape and shouting that phrase.

But the real Tarō Okamoto lived far, far beyond that strangeness.

And everyone who has stood before his work has felt something.

Something they cannot explain.

That something is the ritual force he poured into his work.

The world of Tarō Okamoto — a place only those who are called can reach.

This is where I open the door.

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Prologue: Some Doors Don’t Open Unless You’re Called

Tarō Okamoto is one of the greatest mysteries born in twentieth-century Japan.

Who was he?

“An artist,” say the textbooks. “The man who made the Tower of the Sun for Expo ’70 in Osaka,” say the guidebooks. “The ‘art is an explosion’ guy,” say those who watched television in the eighties.

All of it is correct. And all of it is only the surface.

Far beyond those labels, Okamoto was doing something much deeper.

He was trying to bring ritual power back into modern Japan.

This is not a metaphor. Literally — he was trying to revive, in twentieth-century Japan, the “dialogue with the fourth dimension” that the shamans of the Jōmon era had practiced thousands of years before.

Tower of the Sun. Myth of Tomorrow. Tower of the Mother. All of them are instruments of that ritual power.

And when you stand before these works, you feel something.

Something that is not “just a sculpture,” not “just a painting” — something else radiates from them.

Those who feel it are being called by Tarō Okamoto.

Some feel nothing. They pause, shrug, and walk on. That’s fine, too.

Okamoto does not explain himself to everyone.

But those who feel it, feel it.

And once you’ve felt it, you want to know his work more deeply.

You want to read his books.

You want to follow his footsteps.

And eventually, without fail, you arrive at one place.

The Tarō Okamoto Museum of Art, in Ikuta Ryokuchi Park, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture.

Roughly 1,800 works, donated by Okamoto himself to his hometown of Kawasaki, sleep here.

And in front of that museum stands the thirty-meter Tower of the Mother.

This is Tarō Okamoto’s sacred ground.

But I have to tell you something jarring, right here.

From March 30, 2026, until late March 2029 (Reiwa 11), the museum is closed for renovation.

That’s three years. Three years during which the indoor exhibits cannot be seen.

But don’t worry.

The most colossal, the most important work of Tarō Okamoto — Tower of the Mother — stands outside. So even during the closure, you can see it.

And Ikuta Ryokuchi Park itself is the place where Okamoto grew up. His spirit still drifts through this green.

During the three-year closure, visitor numbers may drop.

But still, those who are called will come.

And they will stand beneath Tower of the Mother.

In that moment, Tarō Okamoto will speak to them.

Not as a voice.

But it arrives, clearly.

“You came. Good. Do not let the explosion inside you die.”

This — this is Tarō Okamoto.

In this article, I will write about him in ways that almost no guidebook does.

Why Okamoto saw “ritual force” in Jōmon pottery. Why Tower of the Sun has been called the “Tree of Life” of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. Why the “fourth face” of Tower of the Sun went missing for fifty years. Why Myth of Tomorrow was discovered, like a miracle, in a storage yard in Mexico. What the last shamanic ritual on Kudaka Island in Okinawa — the one Okamoto witnessed in 1966 — actually was. Why Tower of the Mother is called “a prayer.” And why, right now, you are reading this article.

Tarō Okamoto died on January 7, 1996, at the age of eighty-four.

But his works are alive.

Tower of the Sun. Myth of Tomorrow. Tower of the Mother. All of them still radiate his soul.

And everyone who stands before these works feels it.

“Something is radiating from here.”

That is the true power of Tarō Okamoto.

The same power the shamans of the Jōmon era poured into their pottery.

In the twentieth century, only one man revived it.

And that man’s sacred ground is in Ikuta Ryokuchi Park, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture.

Only those who are called arrive.

And those who arrive are changed forever.

Chapter 1: Who Was Tarō Okamoto? — A Shaman Born into the Holy Family

To understand Tarō Okamoto, you have to first understand the home he was born into.

It was not an ordinary home.

It was an uncanny space — one later remembered by Yasunari Kawabata as Seikazoku — “the Holy Family.”

Kawabata, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, observed the Okamotos closely.

Looking at the household, he wrote: “That house sacrifices life itself for the sake of art. The common sense of an ordinary home does not apply. The child is treated as an artist in his own right — engaged with as a partner in dialogue.”

That “child” was Tarō Okamoto.

His father was Ippei Okamoto, a manga artist. After joining the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, he became known for manga-manbun — a distinctive style that combined cartoon drawings with lively prose. His work was later praised by Sōseki Natsume. He helped shape the early modern culture of manga in Japan.

His mother was Kanoko Okamoto, a tanka poet and novelist. Born in 1889, she showed her talent in classical short-form poetry from her girls’ school days in the Meiji era, studying under Akiko Yosano. Later in life, she immersed herself deeply in Buddhist studies, and left behind an enormous body of writing on Shinran and the Tannishō. Her major novels include Tsuru wa Yamiki (The Crane Sickened), Boshi Jojō (Affection between Mother and Child), and Rōgishō (The Old Geisha) — works that remain central to her literary legacy.

Between this artist father and this poet-and-Buddhist-scholar mother, Tarō Okamoto was born on February 26, 1911, at the Ōnuki family home of his mother, Kanoko, in Futago, Takatsu Village, Kanagawa Prefecture — today’s Futago, Takatsu Ward, Kawasaki City.

And from here, the strangeness of the Okamoto house begins.

Kanoko Okamoto had several lovers, in addition to her husband Ippei.

And not in secret.

She had them openly living in the house.

Ippei accepted this. More than that — he socialized with his wife’s lovers as if they were his own friends.

Inside the Okamoto house lived Tarō, his parents, and his mother’s lovers (more than one), all under one roof.

This is the household Yasunari Kawabata called the Holy Family.

“For the sake of art, anything is permitted.” “The common sense of the world does not matter.”

That was the rule of the Okamoto house.

And Tarō grew up inside it.

His mother, Kanoko, treated him not as a child, but as a human being — an artist.

“You are not a child. You are a being with an independent soul.”

This is what Kanoko said to Tarō, again and again.

In the middle of the night, she would wake him to read him a tanka she had just composed. “What do you think of this?” she would ask her three-year-old son.

Tarō would answer. In the words of a three-year-old.

And Kanoko would listen — seriously.

She was that kind of mother.

Not an ordinary mother.

A child does not get held. Instead, a child gets argued with, about art.

Affection is overshadowed by intellect.

Tarō would later write:

“All my life, I was waiting to be loved by my mother.”

His mother’s love was always being stolen away — by art.

And yet, at the same time, Tarō respected his mother more than anyone.

“My mother lived her entire life for art. Everything in my view of art comes from her.”

Love, reverence, anguish, the longing to be released — all of it tangled together inside Tarō, in complex knots.

And it was this “absence of the mother” and this “longing for the mother” that would, decades later, give birth to one of his greatest works — Tower of the Mother.

At eighteen, Tarō Okamoto crossed over to Europe with his family.

The trigger came in 1929. His father Ippei was sent to London by the Asahi Shimbun to cover the naval disarmament conference, and the entire family went with him. Kanoko, Tarō, and two of Kanoko’s lovers all came along.

This was not an ordinary correspondent’s family.

But for the Okamotos, this was ordinary.

When the conference ended, the family stayed on in Europe. Tarō decided to remain in Paris.

This is where his “Paris years” begin.

From 1929 to 1940 — roughly eleven years.

In Paris, Tarō Okamoto absorbed the leading edge of art, of ethnology, and of philosophy.

And his awakening as a “shaman” begins.

But that story I will write in detail in Chapter 2.

Here, I return once more to Tarō’s home.

Why did Tarō Okamoto, in his later years, develop ideas that sound openly occult — “the ritual force of the Jōmon,” “dialogue with the fourth dimension,” “the Tower of the Sun is a divine icon” — as serious art?

Because the house he was born into was, from the very beginning, not an ordinary house.

Ordinary people, in childhood, have “the common sense of the world” imprinted on them. Don’t cry in public. Endure. Don’t stand out.

That invisible binding — “the unseen curse of Japanese society” — barely touched Tarō.

His mother, Kanoko, taught him this instead:

“The common sense of the world is a lie.” “You must think with your own mind.” “Do not become the same as others.”

And Tarō lived exactly that way.

“Do not become the same as others” — this is a line you still hear today, in modern self-help books.

But for Tarō Okamoto, it was not on that level.

He set out to overturn the very foundation of what a Japanese person is.

In an era when everyone said “Yayoi culture is the tradition of Japan,” he shouted: “Jōmon — that is the true art of Japan.”

In an era when the theme of the Osaka Expo was “Progress and Harmony,” he raised Tower of the Sun and declared: “Humanity has not progressed at all.”

In an era when everyone said “art is beautiful,” he wrote: “Art is ritual.”

Every single time, he flipped the common sense of the world on its head.

How could he do it?

Because the common sense of the world had never been installed in him to begin with.

Kanoko Okamoto — a mother who broke every standard — never let it enter him.

And Tarō, still in that “empty” state, crossed over to Paris.

In Paris, he met the world’s art, cultural anthropology, Surrealism, abstract art, and ethnology.

And all of it poured into his “empty” space, one after another.

An ordinary Japanese person would have filtered all of this through “the common sense of Japan” before digesting it. But Tarō had no such filter.

Everything came in raw.

And inside him, all of it mixed together and fermented into something entirely his own.

The result of that fermentation is what we now call “Tarō Okamoto.”

The ritual force of the Jōmon. Modern art. Jewish mysticism. The atomic bomb. The shamans of Okinawa. In Tarō’s mind, all of them are connected.

In an ordinary person, these things do not connect.

But in Tarō, they connected.

And he released the result into the world — as works of art.

Tower of the Sun. Myth of Tomorrow. Tower of the Mother. Countless paintings. An enormous body of writing.

All of them are fragments of a universe that mixed together inside the head of one extraordinary man, Tarō Okamoto.

And those fragments are still speaking, today, to the people of Japan.

“Are you truly alive?”

“Are you suppressing the explosion inside you?”

“Are you forcing yourself to fit the common sense of the world?”

This is the real message of Tarō Okamoto.

To call him an artist is too small.

He was the last shaman — the one who tried to bring ritual back into modern Japan.

And the starting point of all of it was a house in Kawasaki — the house that came to be called the Holy Family.

Chapter 2: The Man Who Learned Art and Ethnology in Paris — The Door Called Marcel Mauss

In December 1929, the eighteen-year-old Tarō Okamoto set sail from the port of Kobe, traveling with his family as they accompanied his father Ippei on his assignment to cover the London Naval Conference. In January 1930, after passing through Marseille, he arrived in Paris. His parents soon left for London; Tarō decided to stay behind, alone. From that moment until 1940 — when the flames of the Second World War forced him home — he lived in Paris for about ten years. These are Tarō Okamoto’s “Paris years.”

In those ten years, he built the foundation of who Tarō Okamoto would become.

What did he learn? An ordinary exchange student would have studied French, painting technique, perhaps a little European philosophy, and gone home. Tarō Okamoto was different. He plunged into four completely different worlds, simultaneously.

The first — painting.

In Paris, Tarō first threw himself into the world of abstract art. At that time, Paris was the center of the world’s art. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp — the masters who would come to define twentieth-century art were still active, still working. Tarō walked into the middle of all of it.

His most decisive encounter was with Picasso.

In the summer of 1932, at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery at 21 rue La Boétie in Paris, Tarō saw Picasso’s Pichet et coupe de fruits (Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, 1931). He was struck. For Tarō, this was the revolution of painting — and he had to be part of it.

In 1933, Tarō joined Abstraction-Création — the avant-garde abstract art movement that, at the time, was the sharpest edge in the field. As a Japanese painter, his presence there was extraordinary.

But Tarō did not stay inside abstract art.

By 1937, he had withdrawn from the group.

The second — Surrealism.

The purity of abstract art did not satisfy him. Pure form, pure color — abstraction alone, he felt, could not express the human soul. And so he moved toward another world.

That world was Surrealism.

Surrealism was a movement that took the underside of the human being — the unconscious, dreams, hallucination, madness, sex, violence, death — and made it the subject of art. The central figures were André Breton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp. Tarō formed deep ties with them.

Tarō’s oil painting Wounded Arm (Itamashiki Ude) was shown at the Salon des Surindépendants, where it caught the attention of André Breton. The work was later included in André Breton and Paul Éluard’s Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (1938). In January 1938, Tarō exhibited Wounded Arm at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris. As a Japanese artist, he stood unusually close to the center of the Surrealist circle.

And then, another decisive encounter arrived.

In January 1936, Max Ernst invited Tarō to a meeting of Contre-Attaque — an anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist political group. The meeting was held in an attic room on Rue des Grands-Augustins. There, a man was giving a speech.

That man was Georges Bataille (1897–1962) — writer, thinker, and theorist of the sacred.

Bataille had been one of the Surrealists, but he had broken away from Breton’s main current to pursue his own, far more extreme line of philosophy, literature, and anthropology. In later years he would leave behind some of the most important works of twentieth-century French thought — The Accursed Share, Eroticism, Inner Experience.

Tarō was deeply moved by Bataille’s speech. For Bataille, the essence of the human being was not rationality. It was the drive toward Eros, death, excess, the sacred. Modern society repressed this. That was why human beings were not truly alive. Art, religion, and sacrifice were the circuits through which a human being touched their own essence.

This struck Tarō hard. And Bataille was not someone who merely argued these ideas in books. He was someone who tried, seriously, to put them into practice. And the place where he tried to put them into practice was a secret society.

It was called Acéphale — the Headless One.

The word means “headless” in French — a being without a head. Its first public form appeared in June 1936, when the journal Acéphale released its first issue. Around that name, Bataille formed a secret society. Its symbol was a headless human figure. A human with the head — that is, with reason, intellect, society, authority — cut off. In its hands, the figure held a dagger and a flaming heart. At the abdomen, a labyrinth of entrails opened. This ritual image was drawn by the painter André Masson. It was a deliberate inversion of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man — the canonical image of Western classical reason.

For Bataille, Christianity had lost its power. Communism could not save the human being. Fascism could not save the human being. What was needed was a new myth, a new religion, a new rite of mystery. And he set out, in earnest, to found one.

In July 1938, at the age of twenty-seven, Tarō Okamoto joined Acéphale — on Bataille’s personal recommendation. As the only Japanese member.

This is not an exaggeration. It is recorded clearly in the official chronology of the Tarō Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki: “1938 (Shōwa 13), age 27, July / Joined the secret society ‘Acéphale (the Headless)’ on the recommendation of Bataille.”

Acéphale was not a reading group. The members performed real rituals. The place was in a forest near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris. In that forest stood a single, enormous oak tree, struck by lightning and split open — its upper half torn away by the bolt. A headless tree. For Acéphale, it was a sacred tree.

The members gathered beneath that tree on moonless nights. In silence, they performed something. Exactly what they performed has barely been recorded. The members had sworn an oath of secrecy.

But in recent years, letters, internal circulars, and private records have gradually been made public. From them, what has become clear is this. They were deeply influenced by Nietzsche. “God is dead.” But what, then, would a humanity that had lost God believe in instead? Bataille’s answer was tragedy. Human beings should live with death held in their sight. And inside a community, they should once again experience the sacred.

And to bring that sacred back, in earnest, into the modern world, they had a plan.

That plan was human sacrifice.

The idea was that one of the members would be killed during the ritual. That death would bring sacred force into the community. This was not merely symbolic.

As discussed by scholars of Bataille, including Takeshi Sakai, professor emeritus at Hōsei University, Bataille himself volunteered to be the sacrificial victim. But no one came forward to act as the executioner. Everyone feared being charged with murder. And so the human sacrifice was never carried out. (Whether other, non-lethal rites were performed remains difficult to determine.)

Tarō Okamoto was a member of that secret society. Beneath the lightning-struck tree in the forest near Saint-Germain, Tarō stood. On moonless nights, he took part in the rituals of the Headless.

This is the real Paris period of Tarō Okamoto.

After the war, Tarō painted two works — Night and Lightning Bolt. The first shows a massive, headless figure standing in the darkness, the background a chaotic forest gloom. The second is a violent, abstract work that captures the instant of a lightning strike. According to the official explanation of the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum, both works are said to be motivated by his mystical experiences with Acéphale in the forest of Saint-Germain.

In other words, Tarō Okamoto’s postwar work begins where his Acéphale rituals ended.

This is why Tarō Okamoto was not merely a “strange artist.” He was a member of one of the most extreme, most ritualistic, and most dangerous secret societies of twentieth-century Paris.

Tarō himself, in his later writings, recorded that he broke with Acéphale over differences of thought. But his friendship with Bataille lasted for life. In 1953, when Tarō held his first postwar solo exhibition in Paris, Bataille came to the vernissage — the opening — as recorded in the official museum chronology.

And then, one more decisive figure arrived.

The third — ethnology.

That figure was Marcel Mauss.

Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was a French sociologist and ethnologist, the nephew of Émile Durkheim — one of the founding figures of modern sociology. He left behind a series of classic works — The Gift, A General Theory of Magic, On Prayer, Techniques of the Body — that mark him as one of the giants of twentieth-century anthropology.

In 1938, Tarō visited the Musée de l’Homme — the Museum of Mankind, newly opened in the Palais de Chaillot, which had been built for the 1937 Paris Exposition. It housed gods, masks, and ritual instruments from peoples all over the world. He was struck. This, he thought. This is the real art. This is the real expression of life. That same year, Tarō changed his major at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) — from the philosophy he had been studying, to ethnology. And he began to study under Marcel Mauss.

Around Mauss, other names were also gathering. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would later become one of the central figures of structural anthropology. Michel Leiris, the writer and anthropologist. Tarō Okamoto, too, entered that current — one of the most important currents in twentieth-century anthropology.

What did Mauss teach? In essence, this: the peoples of so-called “primitive” societies are neither primitive nor undeveloped. They live, daily, in another world — the very world that modern humans have forgotten. A world of dialogue with the fourth dimension. Magic, art, and religion were not originally separate. For ancient peoples, all of them were one. It was modern society that tore them apart — locking art away in museums, laughing at magic as superstition, confining religion inside institutions. But all of them, originally, were expressions of human life itself.

Inside Tarō, this detonated.

This is it.

Tarō thought.

This was what I had been searching for.

Abstract art, Surrealism — they had only been entrances toward what Tarō was truly seeking.

And if Bataille’s Acéphale was the place where it was practiced, then Marcel Mauss was the figure who, in theory, organized it. Tarō took both into himself — as two wheels of the same vehicle. In the forest of Acéphale, beneath the lightning tree, he experienced the rite. At the Sorbonne, under Mauss, he learned to understand it in the language of anthropology.

What he was truly searching for was ritual — the very moment when a human being connects to the unseen forces of the world. The same unseen force the people of the Jōmon felt as they shaped their pottery. To recreate it as the art of the twentieth century. That became the purpose of Tarō Okamoto’s life.

He enrolled, properly, in the ethnology department of the Sorbonne. For a time, he considered putting down his brush and earning a doctorate as an ethnologist — as he later admitted.

Not an ordinary painter. Not even an ordinary artist. Tarō Okamoto was a painter, an ethnologist, a philosopher, a member of a secret society, and someone trying to bring ritual back into the modern world.

The fourth — politics and war.

And at the end of Tarō’s Paris years, war came.

On February 18, 1939, his mother, Kanoko Okamoto, died in Japan, at the age of forty-nine. Tarō learned of her death by telegram across the sea. He could not attend the funeral. That September, the Second World War began.

In June 1940, as German forces entered and occupied Paris, Tarō left for Japan aboard the Hakusan-maru, the last evacuation ship from Marseille.

He carried his Paris-era works home with him. But history was still waiting.

In May 1945, the Paris-era works he had brought back to Tokyo were destroyed in the air raids on Tokyo, together with the family home in Aoyama Takagichō, in today’s Minami-Aoyama. American B-29 incendiary bombs swept across the area, and everything Tarō had made — risking his life to make it — was gone.

This was Tarō Okamoto’s first “death.”

An ordinary person would have despaired. But Tarō did not. He thought: Good. The old self is dead. I will start again, from zero.

This, too, was what he had learned from Acéphale. Live with death held in your sight. Become headless. Keep killing the old self. Keep being reborn.

And so, in the burned-out fields of postwar Japan, he rose again — as an entirely new Tarō Okamoto. From here, his “discovery of the Jōmon” begins. But that story I will write in Chapter 3.

A summary of the Paris years.

Tarō Okamoto plunged into four worlds in Paris. Abstract art. Surrealism. Ethnology. And finally, war. And at the center of all of it stood two absolute cores. Marcel Mauss’s theory of magic. And Georges Bataille’s secret society Acéphale. In other words, the theory and the practice of the circuit through which a human being connects to unseen forces.

This became the theme of Tarō Okamoto’s entire life.

For Tarō, art was ritual. This was not a slogan. It was a truth — one he had learned, at the Sorbonne, from Marcel Mauss, and one he had experienced, in his own body, in the forest of Saint-Germain, with the comrades of Acéphale. The truth of anthropology and mystical thought, fused.

And he decided to release that truth into the world, as art.

Returning to the burned-out fields of postwar Japan, the first thing he met was a single piece of pottery. It sat behind glass at the Tokyo National Museum.

Jōmon pottery.

The moment he saw it, Tarō cried out.

“What is this?”

And beneath that cry, something was already exploding.

In that moment, the true life of Tarō Okamoto began.

Chapter 3: The Jōmon Shock — This Is an Explosion. This Is Sorcery.

November 7, 1951. Wednesday. The Tokyo National Museum. Tarō Okamoto, forty years old, was walking through the galleries.

The chaos of the postwar years was finally beginning to settle. The Japanese were still dragging the wounds of defeat behind them. This was not an era in which one could feel pride in something called “Japanese tradition.” A backward nation, defeated by America. That was how the Japanese saw themselves at the time.

And what did “Japanese art” mean back then? Yayoi-period bronze bells. The Buddhist statues of Hōryū-ji. The ink paintings of Sesshū. Noh, the tea ceremony, waka poetry. In other words, the refined, serene, harmonious beauty of “everything after the Yayoi period.” That was “the beauty of Japanese tradition.”

The artifacts of the Jōmon period were treated as nothing more than archaeological material. “Jōmon = primitive, raw, savage.” That was the common sense of the day.

But on that day, the Tokyo National Museum was holding a special exhibition. The Exhibition of Ancient Japanese Culture. A curated show of cultural artifacts spanning from the Jōmon to the Kofun period. Day after day, vast crowds of visitors poured in, and the exhibition — originally scheduled to run from October 10 to November 10 — had been hastily extended through November 25.

Tarō stepped into the exhibition hall.

And then, he saw it.

A deep bowl from the middle Jōmon period sat quietly among the archaeological specimens. Later research suggests that the vessel that struck Tarō most strongly was associated with the Sori style and excavated from Miyanomae in Ina, Nagano Prefecture. Across its surface, violently writhing patterns. A wild, dissonant, excessive form.

In front of it, Tarō stopped.

And then, he shouted.

“Nan da, kore wa!” — “What on earth is this?!”

His voice rang out across the gallery. Other visitors turned their heads. But Tarō did not stop.

He stared at the vessel.

An ordinary person, looking at this Jōmon pottery, would probably think: Eerie. Overdecorated. Incomprehensible. But Tarō could see it. The “prayer” that Jōmon people, 5,000 years ago, had poured into this clay. The “sorcery.” The “dialogue with the fourth dimension.”

Why did the Jōmon people make pottery like this — so complex, so excessive, so flame-like?

It was not merely for practical use. If you only need to hold water, cook food, or store something, a simpler vessel will do. And yet they went to such lengths, deliberately forming these intricate patterns across the clay.

Why?

Because the vessel was not “just a container.” The vessel was an instrument of prayer. The vessel was an instrument of ritual. The vessel was a conduit for dialogue with the fourth dimension.

The Jōmon people were hunter-gatherers. Whether they caught their prey today or not, whether they ate today or not, was uncertain — every single day. Their world was saturated with invisible forces. Mountains, rivers, trees, stones — each carried its own spirit. If those spirits grew displeased, no prey would come. And even if it did come, unless the kill was accompanied by prayers of gratitude, the next prey would not be given.

Everything was a negotiation with invisible forces.

The vessel was made as the instrument of that negotiation. The complex patterns on the surface of the pottery — they are not decoration. They are incantations, calling out to the invisible. The patterns on Jōmon pottery served the same function as a written spell. For the Jōmon people, making pottery was the same act as performing sorcery. And when that sorcery reached full intensity, it produced works like these — explosive, full of force.

It was not “art” to the people who made it. The very concept of “art” was a modern invention. For the Jōmon people, there was no distinction between art, sorcery, and religion. All three were one.

Tarō saw through to this.

This vessel was art.

But not only art.

Sorcery, crystallized into form.

And Tarō could not contain his excitement. This — this — was the true tradition of Japan. Not the refined beauty that came after Yayoi. The Jōmon — violent, tough, connected to the fourth dimension — the beauty of raw life. This was the root of Japan.

That day, after about an hour in the museum, Tarō headed off to a roundtable discussion already scheduled at a restaurant in Ginza. But by then, his head was filled with only one thing — Jōmon. In the middle of the discussion, he abruptly cut in: “Actually, I saw some Jōmon pottery today.” And he began telling the other participants about the shock.

For a while after that day, Tarō could barely move. On November 24, the day before the extended exhibition closed, he visited the museum one more time. To face the Jōmon pottery, one last time.

Then came February 1952. He published an essay. Mizue magazine (Bijutsu Shuppan), February 1952 issue. The title: “Dialogue with the Fourth Dimension — On Jōmon Pottery.”

With this essay, Tarō overturned the entire history of Japanese art.

Jōmon is the starting point of Japan. Jōmon pottery is, among all the primitive art in the world, the most violent, the most sorcerous, the work most deeply connected to the fourth dimension. Modern Japanese art must reclaim Jōmon.

This sent shockwaves through the academic world. Archaeologists had treated Jōmon as little more than primitive archaeological remains. And here was an artist — Tarō Okamoto — arguing that Jōmon was the highest peak of art in human history.

And in the essay, there was one decisive sentence.

“The patterns on Jōmon pottery carry an intense religious, magical meaning — in other words, they are oriented toward the fourth dimension.”

“The fourth dimension.” This is not merely a metaphor. Tarō meant it seriously.

Here, “the fourth dimension” should not be read as a technical term in physics.

For Tarō, it was a charged word for the unseen realm pressing against reality.

Spirits.

Gods.

The dead.

The invisible order behind life and death.

That is why this article will continue to use Tarō’s own phrase: “the fourth dimension.”

The Jōmon people were in daily dialogue with the “fourth dimension.” And the evidence of that dialogue remains, carved as the violent patterns on the surface of their pottery. But modern humans have lost the dialogue with the “fourth dimension.” Science advanced. Rationalism spread. Humans came to believe only in what they could see. And so, humans lost their life-force.

Tarō put it this way. The reason modern art has lost its power is that it has lost the dialogue with the fourth dimension. To restore life to art, we must resume the dialogue with the fourth dimension — the very thing the Jōmon people were doing.

This is the bedrock of Tarō Okamoto’s theory of art. Art is sorcery. That idea begins here.

And then, fascinatingly, in the middle of this essay on Jōmon pottery, Tarō suddenly inserted a single word.

“The atomic bomb.”

He argued that modern people, too, were facing invisible forces.

The atomic bomb.

Clashing worlds.

Grotesque economic crises.

And the tragedy of modern art, for Tarō, was that people treated these forces as if they had nothing to do with art.

What does this mean?

Tarō believed that, just as the Jōmon people held dialogue with the invisible forces of the spirit world, modern people must hold dialogue with the invisible energies of the nuclear age.

Jōmon sorcery and the atomic bomb. He was seeing both as one and the same “force of the fourth dimension.”

Jōmon prayer and atomic detonation — both are invisible, overwhelming, life-and-death, the kind of force that determines human fate. And the two are profoundly connected. Just as Jōmon sorcery was an art of dialogue with nature and with the gods, modern art must be an art of dialogue with the nuclear, with the bomb.

This is what would later give birth to one of his masterworks, Myth of Tomorrow. But that story belongs to Chapter 7.

After publishing the essay, Tarō began photographing actual Jōmon pottery himself, in order to deepen his argument. He visited the Idojiri Archaeological Museum in Nagano Prefecture, along with universities and museums across the Tokyo region — many, many times. And it was during this period that he encountered, at last, those flame-like vessels excavated from the Shinano River basin in Niigata — kaen-gata doki, the flame-style pottery. Vessels from roughly 5,000 years ago, with four enormous protrusions thrusting up from the rim like roaring fire. Exploding pottery. Tarō placed photographs of these vessels at the center of “On Jōmon Pottery.”

The photographs of pottery and clay figurines he took during this period were eventually compiled in 1956 into the book Nihon no Dentō (“The Tradition of Japan”), published by Kōbunsha.

Here, let me emphasize this one more time.

Tarō Okamoto did not look at Jōmon pottery and simply think, “Cool.” He saw, inside Jōmon pottery, the most fundamental sorcerous power of the human species. And he resolved that modern art, too, must take that power back.

This is the starting point of every work he made for the rest of his life. Tower of the Sun. Myth of Tomorrow. Mother’s Tower. Countless paintings. All of them are attempts to bring “dialogue with the fourth dimension” back into the modern world.

And Tarō Okamoto himself resolved to live as a sorcerer of modern Jōmon.

At that moment, he was no longer an artist. He was a modern shaman, descended into twentieth-century Japan to recover the sorcery that had been forgotten.

And his real battle was just beginning.

Chapter 4: Dialogue with the Fourth Dimension — The Man Who Saw Jōmon Sorcery and the Atomic Bomb with the Same Eyes

In his 1952 essay on Jōmon pottery, Tarō Okamoto wrote a single sentence that would come to define everything he made afterward.

The patterns on Jōmon pottery carry an intense religious, magical meaning — in other words, they are oriented toward the fourth dimension.

“The fourth dimension.” That phrase runs through every work Tarō Okamoto ever produced.

What Tarō meant by “the fourth dimension” — the invisible, spiritual world — was not his original concept. It is a concept echoed in ancient religions, shamanic traditions, and mystical thought across the entire world. Buddhism calls it higan, the other shore. Shintō calls it tokoyo, the eternal realm. Tibetan esoteric Buddhism speaks of bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth. Christian mysticism speaks of the Kingdom of God. Jewish Kabbalah imagines it through the Sefirot — the ten emanations often arranged as the Tree of Life. The names differ. The doctrines are not the same. But the gesture points in one direction: toward an invisible realm beyond ordinary life.

The Jōmon people were in daily dialogue with this “fourth dimension.” When they made pottery, they bound together earth, fire, their own hands — and the force of the “fourth dimension.” The complex patterns carved into their clay were not decoration. They were incantations, meant to lodge the force of the “fourth dimension” inside the vessel. And once the vessel was complete, it was no longer just a container. It was a sacred instrument, connected to the “fourth dimension.”

This is Jōmon sorcery.

And this is what Tarō Okamoto thought next. Modern people have lost the dialogue with the fourth dimension. So modern art has lost its power. Modern art has become decoration, become design, become self-indulgence. There is no soul in it. There is no life in it.

Tarō attacked this fiercely. And he resolved to resume the “dialogue with the fourth dimension” inside his own art.

But here is where Tarō’s brilliance shows itself. He did not simply say, Let’s go back to Jōmon. He thought it through. The Jōmon people held dialogue with the invisible forces of nature. So — what should modern people hold dialogue with?

His answer was the atomic bomb.

From here, the most original part of Tarō’s thought unfolds.

Tarō put it this way. Modern people no longer hold dialogue with the fourth dimension. And yet there are urgent problems pressing in on us — invisible, but utterly real. The atomic bomb explodes. Two worlds collide. Grotesque economic crises erupt.

What does this mean? The atomic bomb is an invisible force. Radiation, which the human eye cannot see. And yet it decides who lives and who dies. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this force took hundreds of thousands of lives in a single instant. It is not mysticism. It is physics. It is science. But its effect is the same as the wrath of the gods.

The god strikes a man down with lightning — so the ancient people believed. And modern people struck down hundreds of thousands with the atomic bomb. Are these not the same thing? The Jōmon people feared the lightning and prayed to the gods. Modern people must fear the atomic bomb and pray to something. But modern people have forgotten how to pray. So art must take up that role.

This is Tarō’s thought.

And here, his two great masterworks are born.

Tower of the Sun and Myth of Tomorrow.

Tower of the Sun was the symbol of the 1970 Osaka Expo. Myth of Tomorrow was a vast mural painted in Mexico during the same period. Tarō himself said the two works form a pair.

Here, the background of the Osaka Expo itself needs sorting out.

The Japan World Exposition of 1970 (EXPO ’70, the Osaka Expo) was a national project meant to broadcast postwar Japan’s recovery and economic growth to the world. The venue was the Senri Hills in Suita, Osaka. The theme: “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” Across roughly 183 days, around 64 million people visited — a record for any World’s Fair at the time.

But Tarō Okamoto was deeply opposed to that theme, “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” The moment his appointment as Theme Pavilion producer was decided, he was already declaring publicly that mankind had not progressed at all. The ideology of progress is what produced the atomic bomb. The ideology of progress is what turned human beings into people who are no longer alive.

And then Tarō thought this. In the middle of this festival of modernism, I will plant a Jōmon idol that smashes modernism to pieces.

That was Tower of the Sun.

About 70 meters tall. Base diameter about 20 meters. Arms extending about 25 meters on each side. Steel frame, reinforced concrete. On September 9, 1967, Tarō drew the rough sketch of the form we know today. Arms thrown wide, piercing the Festival Plaza’s Big Roof, towering into the sky — a massive idol.

On its front, the Face of the Sun, symbolizing the present (about 12 meters in diameter). On its back, the Black Sun, symbolizing the past (about 8 meters in diameter, made of black Shigaraki ceramic). At its top, the Golden Mask, symbolizing the future (about 10.6 meters in diameter, with eyes 2 meters across). Three faces, running through past, present, and future.

And below the tower, in the basement, there was a fourth face. The Sun of the Underworld. A massive golden mask about 3 meters tall and 11 meters across. It represented the human spiritual world — the source of prayer, the source of the heart.

During the Expo, visitors entered from beneath the tower. The underground exhibition was organized into three spaces: Inochi (Life), Hito (Humanity), and Inori (Prayer). The theme was “Past — The Realm of Origins: The Mystery of Life.” There, visitors traced a path from the birth of life all the way down to the root of the human spiritual world.

And the Inori space — that was the place where Tarō poured the most.

Tarō gathered idols and masks from across the world. He commissioned the young cultural anthropologists of the time to procure religious objects from every region of the globe. African masks. Oceanian idols. Native American ritual implements. Asian Buddhist statues. Japanese dogū figurines. Hundreds of crystallized human prayers, laid out in the underground space.

And at the center of them — the Sun of the Underworld.

What was this?

This was a shamanic ritual space, constructed in the middle of modern Japan. The dialogue with invisible forces — the dialogue that human beings have been practicing since the dawn of time, all over the world. Tarō Okamoto reconstructed that memory at the heart of the Osaka Expo.

He overturned the Expo’s theme, “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” from below — from the roots. Mankind has not progressed. The root of mankind, in every age, is right here. In prayer. In sorcery. In the dialogue with the invisible.

That was Tarō’s message.

After passing through the underground Inori space, visitors entered the bright red interior of the Tower of the Sun.

Inside the tower stands the Tree of Life — about 41 meters tall. On a single tree, 33 species are mounted, tracing roughly 4 billion years of biological evolution (292 specimen models at the time of the Expo, 183 today).

Visitors rode escalators upward from the base of the tower. Amoebas. Trilobites. Fish. Amphibians. Reptiles. Dinosaurs. Mammals. And then — humans. They lived the evolution of life through their own bodies as they climbed. And at the top of the tower, they reached the aerial exhibition space inside the Big Roof. Its theme: “Future — The Realm of Progress.”

This follows the same structural rhythm as shamanic initiation: death and rebirth.

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the historian of religion, famously described shamanic initiation as a pattern of symbolic death, descent, encounter, rebirth, and return.

And Okamoto had read Eliade deeply. Studies of Okamoto’s surviving French books show that several works by Eliade were in his possession, marked with Okamoto’s own underlines and notes. So this reading is not accidental. It belongs to the intellectual soil from which Tower of the Sun grew.

Which means: the visitors to the Theme Pavilion, without knowing it, were being led through a shamanic ritual.

In the underground Inori, they met the gods and masks of the world, and the Sun of the Underworld. That was the shaman’s “death and descent into the underworld.” Inside the tower, they climbed the Tree of Life. That was the shaman’s “rebirth.” At the top, they reached the realm of the future. That was the shaman’s “return to the surface as a new human being.”

Tarō Okamoto did not build Tower of the Sun as a mere monument. He built it as a vast sorcerous apparatus, set down in modern Japan. And it worked.

The Expo drew more than 64 million visitors. But those who entered the Theme Pavilion experienced something stranger. Without knowing it, they passed through a modern shamanic passage — from the underground world of prayer, through the Tree of Life, and upward toward the future.

This is Tarō Okamoto’s greatest act of sorcery.

And then, the other work — Myth of Tomorrow.

5.5 meters tall, 30 meters wide. A vast mural. Painted in Mexico City between 1968 and 1969. Its original shadow: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes — this is a work about the atomic bomb.

At the center, the moment of detonation. In that instant, flesh blasts away, leaving only bone. A human skeleton. The skeleton burns, its mouth thrown wide open, laughing. This is not a scream. It is, in Toshiko Okamoto’s words, the figure of human pride exploding outward as rage.

Around the skeleton, a procession of the dead, and a multiplying mushroom cloud. Toward the right of the painting, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru — the Japanese tuna fishing boat irradiated by the U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1954 — hauls up tuna, oblivious, as the ash of death falls on it. Toward the left, the people who have come through the tragedy, resting together in peace.

The materials: asbestos board, with concrete built up in places, painted in acrylic. Weight: about 14 tons.

This is not just anti-nuclear art. This is modern sorcery. Tarō took the atomic bomb — an invisible, modern force — and rendered it visible as a painting. And in that painting, he depicted the moment when human beings receive that energy, take it on themselves, and rise over it with pride.

Just as the Jōmon people rendered the lightning visible as patterns on pottery — Tarō Okamoto rendered the atomic bomb visible as a painting. And the people who see that painting are, without realizing it, drawn into dialogue with the invisible force of the bomb.

This too is modern sorcery.

And Tower of the Sun and Myth of Tomorrow — the two form a pair.

Tower of the Sun = vertical structure. From the underground, to the surface, to the air. From death, to rebirth.

Myth of Tomorrow = horizontal structure. On the right, the tragedy of the bomb and the Daigo Fukuryū Maru. At the center, the burning skeleton. On the left, humanity that has risen over it with pride.

Both works share the same theme: humanity rises, with pride, over the tragedy of humanity. And both are apparatuses — built by Tarō Okamoto, the modern sorcerer, to enter into dialogue with the invisible forces of the twentieth century: the atomic bomb, shamanism, the fourth dimension.

There is one more thing worth writing down here. Another major work by Tarō Okamoto: Mother’s Tower, in Ikuta Ryokuchi park in Kawasaki, Kanagawa. This too belongs to the same lineage. It is a crystallization of prayer for his mother Kanoko, and at the same time, an entrance into a larger image of motherhood — earthly, human, and cosmic. (Mother’s Tower will be discussed in detail in Chapter 10.)

To close this chapter:

What was art, for Tarō Okamoto? It was “dialogue with the fourth dimension.” Not the fourth dimension of physics — but the dialogue with the invisible world that lies beyond it. Just as the Jōmon people held dialogue with nature and with the gods, Tarō Okamoto practiced, as art, the dialogue with the invisible forces of the twentieth century.

Tower of the Sun — a vast modern ritual space, running through the underground Inori and the surface-level Tree of Life. Myth of Tomorrow — a modern sorcerous painting, rendering visible the invisible modern force of the atomic bomb. Mother’s Tower — a vast tower of prayer, connecting through his late mother to the motherhood of the cosmos. All of them: dialogues with the invisible.

And whoever stands before these works feels something. This is not just art, they feel. Some strange force is being released here, they feel. This is not imagination. Something is being released. The invisible force that Tarō Okamoto poured into his works. Even now, it is still being released — from Mother’s Tower in Ikuta Ryokuchi, from Tower of the Sun in Expo Park, from Myth of Tomorrow at Shibuya Station.

And whoever feels it is called by Tarō Okamoto.

Come over to this side.

Begin your own dialogue with the invisible world.

That is what Tarō Okamoto is calling out to modern Japan. Only those who are called can hear his voice.

Chapter 5: The Tower of the Sun Is an Idol — The Kabbalistic Tree of Life and Eliade’s Passage Through the Body

1970, the Osaka Expo. At the very center of the venue, a strange tower stood 70 meters tall.

The Tower of the Sun.

At its top, the Golden Mask — the future. On its front, the Face of the Sun — the present. On its back, the Black Sun — the past. A white, colossal tower with three faces. Visitors saw it and were unsettled. The Expo’s theme was “Progress and Harmony.” So why was this primitive, idol-like, monstrous thing standing at the center? But this is exactly where Tarō Okamoto’s real intention lay.

Tower of the Sun is not a sculpture. Tower of the Sun is not a monument either.

Tower of the Sun is an idol.

And this is not a metaphor. Ishii Takumi (visiting researcher at the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum), a leading scholar of Okamoto’s work, has explained it this way: “Tower of the Sun was made as something like a living being, a kind of artificial life.” The Tree of Life inside the tower — Tarō described it as the tower’s “bloodstream,” its “blood vessels and nervous system,” its “artery.” In other words, Tower of the Sun was designed as a living thing. And Tarō Okamoto drove it into the heart of modern Japan, as a colossal idol, descended from somewhere else.

Incidentally, in the earliest planning stage, the official name of the tower was not yet Tower of the Sun. At the first official press conference, reported in the Yomiuri Shimbun on October 22, 1967, Tarō introduced the work as “(provisional title) Tree of Life.” In other words, the first name Tarō had in mind was not the tower itself, but the massive structure inside it. For Tarō, the tower and the Tree of Life were inseparable — a single body.

Here, two decisive currents of thought behind the design of Tower of the Sun need to be introduced.

The first is the Tree of Life of Jewish mystical thought — Kabbalah.

Inside the Tower of the Sun, there is a massive structure about 41 meters tall. Tarō Okamoto named it the Tree of Life. A vertical structure that traces the process of biological evolution, from primitive organisms all the way up to humans. 292 specimen models at the time, 183 today (after the 2018 restoration).

Here is the curious fact. Biology, of course, has its own trees of life. Darwin had the metaphor. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) gave evolutionary trees a forceful visual form. But in a technical biological context, the ordinary term is not mystical. It is a phylogenetic tree. An evolutionary tree. Yagi Ryūichi’s Biology (1956 edition), which was in Tarō’s library, also uses the term phylogenetic tree.

So why did Tarō choose the charged name Tree of Life?

The answer is in his library. One of the books said to have been in Tarō Okamoto’s possession was Kurt Seligmann’s The History of Magic. In this book, Jewish mysticism — Kabbalah — is explained in detail. And the central image of Kabbalah is the Tree of Life, the Sefirot.

What is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life? It is the structural diagram of the cosmos in Jewish mystical thought. When God (the infinite light) created the world, ten sefirot (spheres) emanated forth in stages. These ten spheres are represented as the Tree of Life. At the very top: Keter, the Crown — closest to God. At the very bottom: Malkuth — or, in stricter Hebrew transliteration, Malkhut — the Kingdom, the realm of manifestation. Between them, eight spheres, arranged vertically.

This is the structure of the cosmos, and at the same time, the structure of the human soul. A vertical, spiritual path of ascent — the route by which a human being reaches God. That is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

And Tarō Okamoto built, inside Tower of the Sun, a vertical structure tracing the evolution of life — and named it the Tree of Life.

Coincidence?

The fact that Tarō owned a copy of Seligmann’s The History of Magic, which explained Kabbalah. The fact that he deliberately chose the name Tree of Life — a charged, mystical name. Put these two together.

The Tree of Life inside Tower of the Sun is not a literal copy of the Kabbalistic Sefirot. But the echo is impossible to ignore. A vertical tree. A cosmic ladder. Life rising from matter toward spirit. Tarō took the diagram of mysticism and rebuilt it as biology.

Which means: inside Tower of the Sun, visitors were, without knowing it, climbing a modern echo of the cosmological diagram of Jewish mysticism — vertically, upward.

This is absolutely not just a sculpture.

The second current is the thought of the historian of religion Mircea Eliade.

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian-born scholar of religion, one of the most important of the twentieth century. He researched shamanism, myth, ritual, and the structure of the sacred and the profane, across cultures, using the methods of comparative religion. Among his major works were Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy — first published in French in 1951 and later translated into English — The Sacred and the Profane, The Myth of the Eternal Return, and Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture.

And Tarō Okamoto read Eliade deeply. According to research by the art historian Sasaki Hidenori, who studied Tarō’s library, six French-language original editions of Eliade’s works were in Tarō’s possession. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) in particular bore the marks of being read until worn, and Tarō’s own underlines and annotations have been confirmed in the book.

In 2013, the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki held an exhibition called Tarō Okamoto’s Shamanism. The accompanying academic symposium confirmed that Eliade’s thought exerted a deep influence on Tarō’s creative work from around 1950 onward.

What did Eliade uncover?

Across the world, shamanism shares a common structure. It is the initiation of death and rebirth.

When a boy of a traditional society becomes an adult, or when a new shaman is born, he must pass through a specific rite. He undergoes a symbolic death and is reborn.

The boy is shut into a dark cave. Or sent down underground. There, he dies once, socially, symbolically. In the darkness, he converses with gods and spirits, and is granted new knowledge. Then he returns to the surface, reborn as a new human being.

This is the structure of initiation, common to shamanism all over the world. Japanese mountain ascetic practice has the same shape. Shugendō. The tainai-kuguri — the womb-passage, the act of passing through the body of the mother — has the same shape. Christian baptism has the same shape. A vertical path, from death to rebirth.

And Tarō Okamoto built Eliade’s structure into the Tower of the Sun itself.

Look at the visitor’s path through Tower of the Sun one more time. This is the route as Ishii Takumi has formally explained it.

Visitors first descend underground. The basement space — “Past: The Realm of Origins” — was organized into three rooms: Inochi (Life), Hito (Humanity), and Inori (Prayer). At the center, in the Inori space, idols and masks gathered from all over the world surrounded the visitor, with a massive face — the Sun of the Underworld — placed at the center. Death, spirits, the primordial world.

Next, visitors rode escalators up into the interior of the tower. They climbed the Tree of Life, from bottom to top. Primitive organisms, then humans. They traced the path of biological evolution.

From the top of the tower, they emerged onto the Big Roof designed by Tange Kenzō. The aerial exhibit of the future city. “Future: The Realm of Progress.”

Finally, they descended back to the ground. Here, visitors passed through the Tower of the Mother — the Expo-era structure shaped like a placenta — and returned to the surface.

One point must not be confused, here. This Expo-era Tower of the Mother was a placenta-shaped monument built at the exit side of Tower of the Sun during the 1970 Osaka Expo. After the Expo closed, it was dismantled in 1978 along with the Festival Plaza. The Mother’s Tower that Tarō built in his later years, still standing today at Ikuta Ryokuchi in Kawasaki, Kanagawa (30 meters tall, white) is a separate, independent work — a crystallization of prayer for his mother Kanoko. That later one will be discussed in detail in Chapter 10.

So: the Expo-era Tower of the Mother was shaped like a placenta. Visitors passed through the body of the mother and were returned to the surface — as if newly born.

What does this mean?

Visitors were being led, step by step, through a modern reconstruction of shamanic initiation.

Underground: death.

The tree: ascent.

The mid-air level: vision of the future.

The mother’s body: rebirth.

The ground: return to life.

This is structurally identical to tainai-kuguri in Shugendō — the rite of passing through this world into the other and undergoing death and rebirth. It is structurally identical to the shaman’s journey: descending to the realm of spirits, receiving knowledge, and returning.

The scholar Ishii Takumi has described the tower as functioning like an initiation apparatus: the visitor passes through the body of the idol, undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth, and returns.

Which means: the visitors to the Osaka Expo — millions of them — were, without knowing it, passing through a vast modern shamanic ritual.

A frightening thought. But once you see the structure, it is hard to unsee.

Tarō Okamoto did not simply design a tower.

He had encountered Eliade.

He knew the language of magic.

He had books on mysticism in his library.

And he placed this thing at the very center of an Expo whose theme was “Progress and Harmony.”

What was he aiming for?

To return shamanism to postwar Japan.

This was the hidden purpose of Tower of the Sun.

In the high-growth period of postwar Japan, Japan was being dyed in the colors of rationalism. Progress. Economy. Science. That was everything. The ancient festivals, the rites, the sorcery — all of these were being forgotten, dismissed as superstition.

In that era, Tarō felt a sense of crisis. At this rate, the Japanese will completely lose their own root.

So he made a decision. I will turn this — the biggest event of postwar Japan — into a vast shamanic ritual. Visitors will come thinking they are looking at a symbol of progress, and they will leave having undergone the sorcery of Jōmon. Without realizing it, the forgotten Jōmon blood inside them will wake up.

That was Tarō’s scheme.

And it worked.

After the Expo closed, Tower of the Sun alone was spared from demolition. Originally, every Expo pavilion was supposed to be dismantled at the end of the event. On January 23, 1975, the facility disposal committee decided on the permanent preservation of Tower of the Sun. Between 1977 and 1978, the Big Roof and the (placenta-shaped) Mother’s Tower were taken down — but Tower of the Sun was left standing, supported by a petition movement against its removal. Tarō Okamoto himself, whose catchphrase was “Tarō Okamoto has no past,” made an exception for this one work: he strongly wished it to remain.

Why did it draw people in so powerfully?

Because people were feeling something from Tower of the Sun without consciously knowing it. Not by reasoning. By instinct: this must not be destroyed.

That is the effect of Tarō’s sorcery.

And today, Tower of the Sun still stands at the center of Expo ’70 Commemorative Park. From March 19, 2018, the interior was opened to the public. By reservation, you can enter the tower, descend into the Inori basement space, and climb the Tree of Life. And on August 27, 2025, Tower of the Sun was designated a National Important Cultural Property.

We — visitors today — can still walk the route of the shamanic ritual that Tarō designed.

But be warned.

When you step into the interior of Tower of the Sun, you change.

This is not an exaggeration. Read the accounts of those who have gone inside. Many visitors describe the experience in bodily terms rather than analytical ones: speechlessness, tears, a strange afterimage, even dreams.

Not argument. Aftershock.

It is the shamanic force that Tarō Okamoto sealed inside the Tower of the Sun.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and Eliade’s passage through the body. Tarō Okamoto wove the core of the world’s mystical traditions into the inside of Tower of the Sun.

And whoever steps inside, without knowing it, undergoes the rite of those traditions.

This is the true identity of Tower of the Sun.

Not a sculpture.

A colossal modern idol.

And there is another vast work that Tarō was producing during the same period, paired with Tower of the Sun.

Myth of Tomorrow.

But that story belongs to the next chapter.

And Tower of the Sun carries one more vast mystery, still alive today.

The whereabouts of the Sun of the Underworld — the fourth face.

For nearly fifty years after the Expo, one of Tarō Okamoto’s most important works was lost.

That story comes next.

Chapter 6: The Sun of the Underworld — The Fourth Face, Missing for Fifty Years, and the Legend of Agartha

It is generally known that Tower of the Sun has three faces. At the top, the Golden Mask — the future. On the front, the Face of the Sun — the present. On the back, the Black Sun — the past. But the truth is, there were four. And the fourth face was missing for nearly fifty years. This is one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Tarō Okamoto’s work.

The name of the fourth face: the Sun of the Underworld (Chitei no Taiyō). Its size: about 3 meters tall, about 11 meters wide overall. A vast face. It was placed at the very center of the underground space inside Tower of the Sun — the room called Inori (Prayer).

What was Inori? As mentioned in the previous chapter, the underground of Tower of the Sun held a special space. On Tarō Okamoto’s instructions, gods, masks, ethnographic objects, and ritual implements gathered from all over the world were arranged in countless rows. Visitors descended by escalator and stepped first into that space. As far as they could see, the gods and masks of the world surrounded them. At the very center sat the Sun of the Underworld.

A vast, golden face. On either side, prominences shaped like solar flares streamed outward. The lighting on the face and on the background shifted continuously — gold, silver, bronze, red, blue. It was not an exhibition. It was the feeling of standing before the main icon of an ancient temple.

What did Tarō Okamoto make this for? Officially, it is described as “an expression of the primal energy that gives birth to the source of life.” But read it one layer deeper, and it becomes the underworld god of shamanism — the god of the realm of death.

And here, the work connects to one of the great myths that humanity has believed in since antiquity.

Agartha. And Shambhala.

Have you heard of them?

The interior of the Earth is hollow. Inside that hollow, a civilization advanced far beyond anything on the surface exists. They are long-lived, possess paranormal powers, have their own artificial sun, and pilot disc-shaped flying craft. When they come to the surface, humans call those craft UFOs.

In later occult retellings, these names begin to blur. Agartha becomes the subterranean kingdom. Shambhala becomes its hidden sacred center. And in the Western imagination, the dream is sometimes recast as Shangri-La.

The entrances are many. Beneath the Potala Palace in Tibet. Beneath the Gobi Desert in Central Asia. Near the South Pole. At the bottom of valleys in the Andes. UFOs are still frequently sighted in these places. Some, in the popular imagination, come from outer space. But some, persistent theory holds, do not come from space at all — they emerge from inside the Earth.

— So the legend goes.

Laugh if you like. But there was a man in the twentieth century who took this seriously. Who actually went looking.

Adolf Hitler.

In later occult accounts surrounding Hitler, he is said to have been drawn to books about subterranean worlds and prehistoric super-civilizations. A paradise sleeping underground. Cities of gold. Vehicles capable of impossible speeds. Secret tunnels leading to all of it. Hitler came to believe these existed somewhere on Earth — it is said.

And with the power of the Third Reich, he began, in earnest, to look for them — so the story goes.

The Nazis under Hitler pursued the search for the subterranean world in two directions, it is said.

First: Tibet. In 1938, SS chief Heinrich Himmler dispatched an SS expedition to Tibet, led by Ernst Schäfer. This is historical fact. Officially, it was presented as a scientific expedition — zoology, anthropology, geography, and natural history. But within the ideological world of the SS, Tibet was also tied to fantasies about Aryan origins. And tied up with the occult currents inside the Nazi movement, the search for the entrance to the subterranean kingdom of Shambhala is also said to have been one of their aims. The legend whispered in those occult circles was that the entrance lay beneath the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet.

A strange statue would later be tied to that expedition — the so-called “Iron Man.” A seated statue of Vaiśravaṇa, 24 centimeters tall, weighing 10.6 kilograms, with a swastika carved into its chest. In 2012, research from the University of Stuttgart identified the material as a fragment of the Chinga meteorite — which had fallen on the Mongolia-Siberia border about 15,000 years earlier. A Buddhist statue, carved from a stone that came from space.

Second: Antarctica. This, too, belongs to the historical record. In 1938–39, the Nazis dispatched an Antarctic expedition to a region they named Neuschwabenland. The stated purpose was to secure a whaling base. For Germany at the time, whale oil was a strategic raw material — used in margarine and soap, and also connected to military production.

This much is fact.

But after the war, strange rumors spread. Adolf Hitler and a small circle of close confidants escaped through an opening in Antarctica into the hollow interior of the Earth. The Nazis had built a secret subterranean base beneath the Antarctic ice. These are now treated, historically, as conspiracy theories without foundation.

And yet, a certain military operation, carried out right after the war, looked almost as though it were intended to confirm those theories.

From December 1946 to March 1947, the U.S. Navy conducted a large-scale Antarctic operation called Operation Highjump. Commander: Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Forces deployed: 13 ships, 33 aircraft, 4,700 personnel. Officially, its purposes included training personnel, testing equipment in polar conditions, studying the feasibility of Antarctic bases, and expanding geographical and meteorological knowledge. But to later conspiracy theorists, the scale looked excessive for a simple research mission. So, almost immediately after the war, a conspiracy theory began to circulate: the real purpose was to pursue Nazi remnants at their secret Antarctic base.

And during the operation, Admiral Byrd is said to have had a strange experience. While flying over Antarctica, a cigar-shaped UFO emerged from below and shadowed his aircraft. Byrd is said to have descended into a subterranean world, where he met beings with Asian-looking features. They possessed a civilization advanced beyond anything on the surface.

— So the story goes.

By the standards of modern verification, the hollow-Earth claim does not stand. The Earth is not hollow. There is mantle. There is outer core. There is inner core. No hidden sun. No inner kingdom. As for Byrd’s “subterranean experience,” no verifiable primary source exists.

But myth does not die that easily.

The notion that the interior of the Earth is physically hollow has been refuted by modern science.

However, the intuition that an invisible world — a spiritual other-world — exists somewhere downward is a feeling shared across the myths of all humanity.

The Buddhist hell lies underground. The realm of Hades in Greek myth: underground. The realm of Hel in Norse myth: underground. The Japanese realm of Yomi: underground. The Sumerian land of the dead: underground.

Why has humanity, the world over, placed the realm of the dead and the invisible world below?

Because, instinctively, human beings have always sensed that something is down there.

The Jōmon people poured the force of the underworld into their pottery. The people of the Kofun period built massive tombs into the earth. The Pharaohs of Egypt placed the bodies of kings in the chambers beneath their pyramids.

The underground is humanity’s primal entrance to the invisible world.

And Tarō Okamoto knew this. He had read Eliade. He had studied the shamanism of the world. He had absorbed its myths. The primal human equation — underground = the realm of death = the invisible world = another world — he understood it deeply.

So he designed the Inori space into the underground of Tower of the Sun. And at its center, he placed the Sun of the Underworld. A device meant to remind modern Japanese: there is an invisible world down below. You have forgotten it, but it is there.

After the Expo closed, almost every pavilion was torn down. Tower of the Sun alone was spared. But the underground space of the tower was removed. The Inori space was dismantled. Most of the gods and masks gathered from around the world were passed on to the National Museum of Ethnology (opened in 1977).

And only the Sun of the Underworld went missing.

It disappeared somewhere during the dismantling. To be precise — after being removed, it was transported somewhere. But where became unknown. The records were not preserved.

A face 3 meters tall, 11 meters wide overall. Not the kind of object you can simply misplace. And yet — it vanished. And it stayed vanished for nearly fifty years.

The other three faces of Tower of the Sun — Golden Mask, Face of the Sun, Black Sun — are part of the tower itself. As long as the tower stands, they remain. But the Sun of the Underworld alone had been placed underground as a separate, independent work. So after removal, its whereabouts could not be traced.

Tarō Okamoto himself knew this. Until he died in 1996, the Sun of the Underworld remained missing. His adopted daughter Toshiko Okamoto searched for it many times, but could not find it.

Why did it disappear? The exact circumstances are still unclear.

But if one offers an occult reading, it goes like this.

The Sun of the Underworld is the underworld god of shamanism. The underworld god does not linger on the surface. By nature, it belongs hidden underground.

By Tarō Okamoto’s hand, it was temporarily drawn up to the center of an Expo — a “festival.” For half a year, the underworld god faced the visitors there, in the basement of Tower of the Sun. And the moment the festival ended, the Sun of the Underworld, of its own accord, vanished from the surface.

As if it had decided: I no longer need to be here.

And for fifty years it returned, once again, underground. To Agartha. To Shambhala. To the invisible world below. In some forgotten corner of a human warehouse, unnoticed, the underworld god slept quietly.

— Such a reading is also possible.

2018. After nearly fifty years, the Sun of the Underworld was restored. To be precise: the original has still never been found. From the surviving photographs, design sketches, and testimonies of those involved, it was reconstructed as faithfully as possible. Kaiyodo, the figure manufacturer, cooperated in the restoration. And it was installed inside Tower of the Sun, in the new basement space. From 2018, with the opening of the interior, visitors can see the Sun of the Underworld as well.

So: what people see today in the basement of Tower of the Sun is the restored Sun of the Underworld.

Where is the original, now?

— For a long time, nobody knew.

But on May 3, 2025, NHK aired a program called Chase the Vanished Face of Tower of the Sun: A Mystery Documentary on an Unsolved Riddle of the Expo. In an independent investigation by the biologist Fukuoka Shin’ichi (one of the producers of a signature pavilion at the 2025 Osaka–Kansai Expo) and NHK, a new clue surfaced. Three design drawings from Tarō Okamoto’s own studio — long believed lost — were discovered. And on the basis of testimony from former Hyōgo Prefecture officials and waste-processing cooperatives, the program proposed a new theory: the Sun of the Underworld was kept disassembled in a Hyōgo Prefecture facility until 1980. When that facility was demolished and relocated, the parts were most likely buried, along with other waste, at the Fusehata disposal site in Kobe.

Which means: the Sun of the Underworld may be buried in the ground.

Literally. The Sun of the Underworld returned to the underworld.

If this is true, then Tarō Okamoto’s work has left a strange poem behind in the modern world. The image of the underworld god, returned to the underworld. It may not have been Tarō’s design. But as an outcome, it is the most Tarō-like ending imaginable.

Of course, even the Fusehata theory is not yet confirmed. As of this writing, the original has not been excavated. Several possibilities remain. It may already have been discarded. It may still sleep in some warehouse. Or — the Sun of the Underworld may have returned to the very Agartha that Hitler sought in Tibet, and that the Nazi SS sought beneath Antarctica.

That judgment is left to the reader.

But this much can be said.

By building Tower of the Sun, Tarō Okamoto tried to remind modern Japan of the underground world — the invisible other-world that humanity has believed in since antiquity.

And the strange fact that the Sun of the Underworld — which was meant to stand at the center of that effort — went missing for nearly fifty years. Wasn’t this, too, part of the effect of Tarō Okamoto’s sorcery?

The god of the underworld returns to the underworld.

That is the true structure of Tower of the Sun.

And there is one more vast work by Tarō Okamoto that, like the Sun of the Underworld, was once lost and miraculously rediscovered. Myth of Tomorrow. A massive mural, left to deteriorate in a Mexico City storage yard for thirty years. That story comes in the next chapter.

Chapter 7: Myth of Tomorrow — The Mural Miraculously Found in a Mexican Warehouse

1968. While designing the Tower of the Sun, Tarō was working on another massive piece in parallel.

In Mexico City.

It was called Myth of Tomorrow. A colossal mural. 5.5 meters tall, 30 meters wide. One of the masterpieces of his life — the twin of the Tower of the Sun, the two works forming a single, paired whole.

First — why Mexico? The story goes like this.

In 1968, Mexico City was set to host the Olympics. Tourists were expected to pour in from across the world. And in the heart of the city, an enormous hotel complex was under construction — the Hotel de México, planned as one of the grandest architectural projects in Latin America.

The owner was Manuel Suárez. A Mexican industrialist, well known as a patron of the arts. Through Jūnzō Oguri, a Japanese landscape gardener living in Mexico, he came to know Tarō’s work. And he asked Tarō to create a massive mural for the hotel’s lobby.

Tarō accepted.

In July 1967, after observing Expo 67 in Montreal, Tarō visited Mexico to film the television documentary Tarō Okamoto Explores Latin America. He toured the construction site of the hotel and agreed to take on the mural.

From 1968 to 1969, Tarō traveled to Mexico City roughly thirty times. He worked from a private studio — a former supermarket building, still under construction, repurposed for him. Between his work on the Theme Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka, he flew back and forth across the Pacific.

Mexico held a special meaning for Tarō. Ancient Mexico had been home to the Aztec and Maya civilizations — cultures shaped by ritual sacrifice, solar myth, death, rebirth, and a fierce sense of the unseen. The same “dialogue with the fourth dimension” that Tarō had seen in Jōmon Japan — they had been doing it too.

Tarō felt a deep kinship with ancient Mexican civilization. For Tarō, Jōmon Japan and ancient Mexico seemed to look at the world through the same kind of eyes.

And so, the mural Tarō painted in Mexico carried both — the ancient magic of Mexico and the magic of Jōmon Japan, flowing together into a single image.

And the theme was the atomic bomb.

Why paint a mural about the atomic bomb in the lobby of a Mexican hotel?

This is where Tarō’s worldview becomes singular.

For Tarō, the atomic bomb was the greatest “invisible force” facing modern humanity. The radiation that, in a single instant, took hundreds of thousands of lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Invisible. Unseeable. It was the modern equivalent of the wrath of the gods. Just as ancient people had feared the lightning as the power of the divine — modern people had to fear the atomic bomb as a divine power they themselves had created.

And so Tarō thought it through. The lobby of a Mexican hotel was a place where people gathered from all over the world. Americans came. Europeans came. Asians came. Place a mural of the atomic bomb there. Make the people of the world see it every day. That, he believed, would become a site of modern prayer.

This is an astonishing idea.

A normal artist would never accept such a commission. A painting of the atomic bomb in a hotel lobby? The client will be furious. That is the kind of reaction one would expect.

But Tarō was different. He wanted to show the world the invisible force of the atomic bomb — made visible. And he wanted the people who saw the painting to enter, without knowing it, into a dialogue with this modern god.

This is modern magic.

The original subtitle of the work, at the time of its completion, was “Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” From the very beginning, Tarō had conceived this mural explicitly as a work about the atomic bomb.

And the finished mural was staggering.

In the center stands a human skeleton, burning. It is a human being from whom flesh has been blown away in the instant of the blast, leaving only bone. The skeleton opens its mouth wide and laughs. Toshiko Okamoto explained it this way: “The burning skeleton, mouth open wide in laughter, is a figure exploding with rage as a matter of human pride.”

Around the skeleton — the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (the Lucky Dragon No. 5, a Japanese tuna boat exposed to radioactive fallout during the 1954 U.S. hydrogen-bomb test at Bikini Atoll), a procession of the dead, proliferating mushroom clouds, and on the left, people resting peacefully in a world of calm.

This is the heart of Myth of Tomorrow.

Tarō did not paint the atomic bomb as mere tragedy. He painted it as the starting point — the place where humanity overcomes, and from which a new myth begins. Even the cruelest catastrophe can be transcended, with pride. And it is only beyond that transcendence that a new myth is born.

If Picasso’s Guernica stands as an image of war’s tragedy, Tarō’s Myth of Tomorrow pushes beyond tragedy — toward the human power to overcome it.

That is the fundamental difference between the two.

September 1969. The mural was complete.

Only the signature remained — to be added when the work was formally handed over to the client. The mural had been temporarily installed in the hotel lobby.

But then — tragedy struck.

The hotel was never completed. Manuel Suárez’s financial situation collapsed rapidly. The unfinished hotel was abandoned, and eventually passed into other hands.

Contact with Tarō was lost.

And the mural was removed from the lobby.

A masterpiece Tarō had poured his life into was torn from its place and carried off somewhere. It still bore no signature.

Tarō was still alive at the time. But he could not pursue the mural. He had returned to Japan, consumed by the completion of the Tower of the Sun and the opening of Expo ’70 in Osaka. The mural drifted away, somewhere in Mexico, beyond his reach.

And from there began the long, long disappearance of Myth of Tomorrow.

The mural moved from place to place across Mexico.

Where it went — no one knows precisely. Warehouse to warehouse. Owner to owner. A vast painting in transit. Without proper restoration, without proper storage, the painting slowly took damage.

The hotel building itself was eventually opened in 1994 as the World Trade Center. Records suggest the mural was still inside the building until around 1989 or 1990.

After that — it vanished.

Completely.

Tarō lived out his remaining years without knowing what had happened. On January 7, 1996, Tarō Okamoto died at the age of 84. Never knowing where Myth of Tomorrow had gone.

But Toshiko Okamoto, his adopted daughter, never gave up.

Toshiko had been Tarō’s secretary for many years — a woman who had supported him at his side throughout his career. Later, as his adopted daughter, she inherited his estate and took over the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum.

She believed it without wavering. Myth of Tomorrow was Tarō’s greatest, highest masterpiece. She would find it. She would bring it back to Japan.

She traveled to Mexico again and again. She chased every lead. Suárez’s associates, Mexican art-world contacts, warehouse operators, real estate agents — every possible route, she followed.

And then, in September 2003.

A miracle happened.

There was a storage yard on the outskirts of Mexico City. A place where a warehouse operator had been storing miscellaneous goods for years.

Toshiko traveled there.

And she saw it.

Surrounded by dust and assorted materials, a vast painting was propped against a wall.

It was Myth of Tomorrow.

For 34 years, Tarō’s greatest masterpiece had been missing. And here it stood, in a corner of a Mexican storage yard, unnoticed, silent.

Toshiko stood before the painting, unable to move.

And then she wept.

Tarō had poured his life into this painting — and there it was, in a place like this.

But these were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of joy.

She had found it. Now she could bring it home.

There and then, she resolved: she would buy it back. She would bring it to Japan. She would restore it. And she would show it to the people of Japan.

This was the beginning of the Myth of Tomorrow Restoration Project.

A project office was established within the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Foundation. Full-scale work toward transport and restoration began. Negotiations to repurchase the work, the logistics of shipping, fundraising for restoration. Toshiko led every part of it herself.

In 2005, Myth of Tomorrow was finally transported to Japan.

And in Ehime Prefecture, the restoration work began.

A mural 5.5 meters tall and 30 meters wide. To restore it was among the largest projects in the history of Japanese art conservation. After more than three decades in poor conditions, the painting had suffered severe damage. The task: to return it, as closely as possible, to the state in which Tarō had painted it.

The restoration was difficult. But through the determination of everyone involved, it was completed in June 2006. Thirty-seven years after its completion, three years after its rediscovery — Myth of Tomorrow recovered its brilliance.

July 2006. The restored mural was unveiled to the public for the first time, in Tokyo’s Shiodome district. In just 50 days, around 2 million people came to see it.

April 27, 2007 to June 29, 2008. The mural was specially exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Massive media coverage followed. And from this moment, the “myth” of Tarō Okamoto began to be rebuilt within contemporary Japan.

Then the question turned to where the mural should be permanently installed. Hiroshima (the atomic-bombed city), Suita in Osaka (where the Tower of the Sun stands), and Shibuya in Tokyo (near Tarō’s old studio) were the three candidates.

The director of the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum visited every candidate site. And in the end, the judgment came down to this: a place with great power, where vast numbers of people pass through every day — a place suitable for public art, where people who had no intention of seeking out the work would happen upon it by chance.

The answer was Shibuya.

Specifically, the connecting passage inside Shibuya Mark City. The corridor linking JR Shibuya Station and the Keio Inokashira Line Shibuya Station. A place where roughly 300,000 people pass every day.

On August 27, 2008, installation work began. Because the site was a connecting passage between two stations, work was carried out at night, between the last train and the first train of the next morning.

On November 17, 2008, Myth of Tomorrow was unveiled to the public in Shibuya.

This too was a near-miraculous choice.

Why Shibuya?

The official statement from the Myth of Tomorrow Preservation and Inheritance Foundation puts it this way:

The reason Myth of Tomorrow was brought to Shibuya is that only “Shibuya” — only shibuya — only SHIBUYA — could offer a place where the old and the cutting-edge live side by side, where the mysterious power of Myth of Tomorrow*, amplified by absorbing the energy of the people who pass through, can return to each individual walking the streets as energy directed toward the future.*

“The mysterious power of Myth of Tomorrow.”

That is the official wording.

In other words, the Preservation and Inheritance Foundation officially acknowledges:

This mural has a mysterious power that cannot be explained as merely an artwork.

That power absorbs the energy of the people moving through the streets, and amplifies it.

And that energy returns to those people, as energy directed toward the future.

This is, precisely, the modern magic Tarō Okamoto designed.

A painting that gives energy to the one who sees it.

This is not a painting. It is a device. A device that visualizes, amplifies, and radiates energy.

And Myth of Tomorrow, even now, in the connecting passage of Shibuya Station, releases its energy every day, before the eyes of roughly 300,000 people.

That said — since October 2023, after fifteen years on display, a large-scale renovation and restoration has begun. Crowdfunding campaigns have been carried out to support the project. Myth of Tomorrow will continue to be preserved, across generations.

Most of the people passing through never notice the painting. Or notice it but never stop. They walk past, eyes on their phones.

But some — stop.

And stand for a while, in front of the painting.

Those people are being called by Tarō Okamoto.

The energy released from the painting — they are receiving it, without knowing.

And after that, something in their lives changes.

This is the true function of Myth of Tomorrow.

Pause for a moment, and consider this again.

Tarō Okamoto’s greatest masterpiece — a painting he poured his life into — lay in a Mexican storage yard for 34 years, unnoticed, silent.

This is a structure remarkably similar to that of the Underground Sun, which we examined in Chapter 6.

The Underground Sun, too, slept somewhere — in some warehouse, or perhaps on the seabed off Yumeshima — for around 50 years, unnoticed by anyone.

Why do Tarō Okamoto’s most important works keep vanishing, unseen by anyone?

Because these works belong to the invisible world.

The Underground Sun is the god of the underworld. So it returned underground.

Myth of Tomorrow is the visualization of the invisible force of the atomic bomb. So it disappeared from human sight.

And both — when the time comes — appear again before human eyes.

The Underground Sun appeared again in 2018, as a recreation. Myth of Tomorrow was found in 2003, through Toshiko Okamoto’s determination.

Tarō’s works appear and disappear on their own timing.

This, too, feels like part of Tarō Okamoto’s magic.

And now, in the connecting passage of Shibuya Station, Myth of Tomorrow quietly releases its energy.

Among the passersby, those who feel it are very few.

But those who feel it — without knowing it — are drawn into the world of Tarō Okamoto.

And eventually, they arrive at one particular place.

The Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, in Ikuta Ryokuchi Park, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The sacred ground of Tarō Okamoto.

To tell that story, however, one more piece of Tarō Okamoto’s fieldwork must first be set down.

1966. Kudaka Island (Kudakajima), Okinawa. Tarō Okamoto, camera in hand, witnesses Izaihō — one of Japan’s last great shamanic rites, a ritual that would disappear after 1978.

The next chapter tells that story.

Chapter 7: Myth of Tomorrow — The Mural Miraculously Found in a Mexican Warehouse

1968. While designing the Tower of the Sun, Tarō was working on another massive piece in parallel.

In Mexico City.

It was called Myth of Tomorrow. A colossal mural. 5.5 meters tall, 30 meters wide. One of the masterpieces of his life — the twin of the Tower of the Sun, the two works forming a single, paired whole.

First — why Mexico? The story goes like this.

In 1968, Mexico City was set to host the Olympics. Tourists were expected to pour in from across the world. And in the heart of the city, an enormous hotel complex was under construction — the Hotel de México, planned as one of the grandest architectural projects in Latin America.

The owner was Manuel Suárez. A Mexican industrialist, well known as a patron of the arts. Through Junzō Oguri, a Japanese landscape gardener living in Mexico, he came to know Tarō’s work. And he asked Tarō to create a massive mural for the hotel’s lobby.

Tarō accepted.

In July 1967, after observing Expo 67 in Montreal, Tarō visited Mexico to film the television documentary Tarō Okamoto Explores Latin America. He toured the construction site of the hotel and agreed to take on the mural.

From 1968 to 1969, Tarō traveled to Mexico City roughly thirty times. He worked from a private studio — a former supermarket building, still under construction, repurposed for him. Between his work on the Theme Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka, he flew back and forth across the Pacific.

Mexico held a special meaning for Tarō. Ancient Mexico had been home to the Aztec and Maya civilizations — cultures shaped by ritual sacrifice, solar myth, death, rebirth, and a fierce sense of the unseen. The same “dialogue with the fourth dimension” that Tarō had seen in Jōmon Japan — they had been doing it too.

Tarō felt a deep kinship with ancient Mexican civilization. For Tarō, Jōmon Japan and ancient Mexico seemed to look at the world through the same kind of eyes.

And so, the mural Tarō painted in Mexico carried both — the ancient magic of Mexico and the magic of Jōmon Japan, flowing together into a single image.

And the theme was the atomic bomb.

Why paint a mural about the atomic bomb in the lobby of a Mexican hotel?

This is where Tarō’s worldview becomes singular.

For Tarō, the atomic bomb was the greatest “invisible force” facing modern humanity. The radiation that, in a single instant, took hundreds of thousands of lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Invisible. Unseeable. It was the modern equivalent of the wrath of the gods. Just as ancient people had feared the lightning as the power of the divine — modern people had to fear the atomic bomb as a divine power they themselves had created.

And so Tarō thought it through. The lobby of a Mexican hotel was a place where people gathered from all over the world. Americans came. Europeans came. Asians came. Place a mural of the atomic bomb there. Make the people of the world see it every day. That, he believed, would become a site of modern prayer.

This is an astonishing idea.

A normal artist would never accept such a commission. A painting of the atomic bomb in a hotel lobby? The client will be furious. That is the kind of reaction one would expect.

But Tarō was different. He wanted to show the world the invisible force of the atomic bomb — made visible. And he wanted the people who saw the painting to enter, without knowing it, into a dialogue with this modern god.

This is modern magic.

The original subtitle of the work, at the time of its completion, was “Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” From the very beginning, Tarō had conceived this mural explicitly as a work about the atomic bomb.

And the finished mural was staggering.

In the center stands a human skeleton, burning. It is a human being from whom flesh has been blown away in the instant of the blast, leaving only bone. The skeleton opens its mouth wide and laughs. Toshiko Okamoto explained it this way: “The burning skeleton, mouth open wide in laughter, is a figure exploding with rage as a matter of human pride.”

Around the skeleton — the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (the Lucky Dragon No. 5, a Japanese tuna boat exposed to radioactive fallout during the 1954 U.S. hydrogen-bomb test at Bikini Atoll), a procession of the dead, proliferating mushroom clouds, and on the left, people resting peacefully in a world of calm.

This is the heart of Myth of Tomorrow.

Tarō did not paint the atomic bomb as mere tragedy. He painted it as the starting point — the place where humanity overcomes, and from which a new myth begins. Even the cruelest catastrophe can be transcended, with pride. And it is only beyond that transcendence that a new myth is born.

If Picasso’s Guernica stands as an image of war’s tragedy, Tarō’s Myth of Tomorrow pushes beyond tragedy — toward the human power to overcome it.

That is the fundamental difference between the two.

September 1969. The mural was complete.

Only the signature remained — to be added when the work was formally handed over to the client. The mural had been temporarily installed in the hotel lobby.

But then — tragedy struck.

The hotel was never completed. Manuel Suárez’s financial situation collapsed rapidly. The unfinished hotel was abandoned, and eventually passed into other hands.

Contact with Tarō was lost.

And the mural was removed from the lobby.

A masterpiece Tarō had poured his life into was torn from its place and carried off somewhere. It still bore no signature.

Tarō was still alive at the time. But he could not pursue the mural. He had returned to Japan, consumed by the completion of the Tower of the Sun and the opening of Expo ’70 in Osaka. The mural drifted away, somewhere in Mexico, beyond his reach.

And from there began the long, long disappearance of Myth of Tomorrow.

The mural moved from place to place across Mexico.

Where it went — no one knows precisely. Warehouse to warehouse. Owner to owner. A vast painting in transit. Without proper restoration, without proper storage, the painting slowly took damage.

The hotel building itself was eventually opened in 1994 as the World Trade Center. Records suggest the mural was still inside the building until around 1989 or 1990.

After that — it vanished.

Completely.

Tarō lived out his remaining years without knowing what had happened. On January 7, 1996, Tarō Okamoto died at the age of 84. Never knowing where Myth of Tomorrow had gone.

But Toshiko Okamoto, his adopted daughter, never gave up.

Toshiko had been Tarō’s secretary for many years — a woman who had supported him at his side throughout his career. Later, as his adopted daughter, she inherited his estate and took over the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum.

She believed it without wavering. Myth of Tomorrow was Tarō’s greatest, highest masterpiece. She would find it. She would bring it back to Japan.

She traveled to Mexico again and again. She chased every lead. Suárez’s associates, Mexican art-world contacts, warehouse operators, real estate agents — every possible route, she followed.

And then, in September 2003.

A miracle happened.

There was a storage yard on the outskirts of Mexico City. A place where a warehouse operator had been storing miscellaneous goods for years.

Toshiko traveled there.

And she saw it.

Surrounded by dust and assorted materials, a vast painting was propped against a wall.

It was Myth of Tomorrow.

For 34 years, Tarō’s greatest masterpiece had been missing. And here it stood, in a corner of a Mexican storage yard, unnoticed, silent.

Toshiko stood before the painting, unable to move.

And then she wept.

Tarō had poured his life into this painting — and there it was, in a place like this.

But these were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of joy.

She had found it. Now she could bring it home.

There and then, she resolved: she would buy it back. She would bring it to Japan. She would restore it. And she would show it to the people of Japan.

This was the beginning of the Myth of Tomorrow Restoration Project.

A project office was established within the Taro Okamoto Memorial Foundation for the Promotion of Contemporary Art. Full-scale work toward transport and restoration began. Negotiations to repurchase the work, the logistics of shipping, fundraising for restoration. Toshiko led every part of it herself.

In 2005, Myth of Tomorrow was finally transported to Japan.

And in Ehime Prefecture, the restoration work began.

A mural 5.5 meters tall and 30 meters wide. To restore it was among the largest projects in the history of Japanese art conservation. After more than three decades in poor conditions, the painting had suffered severe damage. The task: to return it, as closely as possible, to the state in which Tarō had painted it.

The restoration was difficult. But through the determination of everyone involved, it was completed in June 2006. Thirty-seven years after its completion, three years after its rediscovery — Myth of Tomorrow recovered its brilliance.

July 2006. The restored mural was unveiled to the public for the first time, in Tokyo’s Shiodome district. In just 50 days, around 2 million people came to see it.

April 27, 2007 to June 29, 2008. The mural was specially exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Massive media coverage followed. And from this moment, the “myth” of Tarō Okamoto began to be rebuilt within contemporary Japan.

Then the question turned to where the mural should be permanently installed. Hiroshima (the atomic-bombed city), Suita in Osaka (where the Tower of the Sun stands), and Shibuya in Tokyo (near Tarō’s old studio) were the three candidates.

The director of the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum visited every candidate site. And in the end, the judgment came down to this: a place with great power, where vast numbers of people pass through every day — a place suitable for public art, where people who had no intention of seeking out the work would happen upon it by chance.

The answer was Shibuya.

Specifically, the connecting passage inside Shibuya Mark City. The corridor linking JR Shibuya Station and the Keio Inokashira Line Shibuya Station. A place where roughly 300,000 people pass every day.

On August 27, 2008, installation work began. Because the site was a connecting passage between two stations, work was carried out at night, between the last train and the first train of the next morning.

On November 17, 2008, Myth of Tomorrow was unveiled to the public in Shibuya.

This too was a near-miraculous choice.

Why Shibuya?

The official statement from the Myth of Tomorrow Preservation and Inheritance Foundation puts it this way:

The reason Myth of Tomorrow was brought to Shibuya is that only “Shibuya” — only shibuya — only SHIBUYA — could offer a place where the old and the cutting-edge live side by side, where the mysterious power of Myth of Tomorrow*, amplified by absorbing the energy of the people who pass through, can return to each individual walking the streets as energy directed toward the future.*

“The mysterious power of Myth of Tomorrow.”

That is the official wording.

In other words, the Preservation and Inheritance Foundation officially acknowledges:

This mural has a mysterious power that cannot be explained as merely an artwork.

That power absorbs the energy of the people moving through the streets, and amplifies it.

And that energy returns to those people, as energy directed toward the future.

This is, precisely, the modern magic Tarō Okamoto designed.

A painting that gives energy to the one who sees it.

This is not a painting. It is a device. A device that visualizes, amplifies, and radiates energy.

And Myth of Tomorrow, even now, in the connecting passage of Shibuya Station, releases its energy every day, before the eyes of roughly 300,000 people.

That said — since October 2023, after fifteen years on display, a large-scale renovation and restoration has begun. Crowdfunding campaigns have been carried out to support the project. Myth of Tomorrow will continue to be preserved, across generations.

Most of the people passing through never notice the painting. Or notice it but never stop. They walk past, eyes on their phones.

But some — stop.

And stand for a while, in front of the painting.

Those people are being called by Tarō Okamoto.

The energy released from the painting — they are receiving it, without knowing.

And after that, something in their lives changes.

This is the true function of Myth of Tomorrow.

Pause for a moment, and consider this again.

Tarō Okamoto’s greatest masterpiece — a painting he poured his life into — lay in a Mexican storage yard for 34 years, unnoticed, silent.

This is a structure remarkably similar to that of the Underground Sun, which we examined in Chapter 6.

The Underground Sun, too, slept somewhere — in some warehouse, or perhaps on the seabed off Yumeshima — for around 50 years, unnoticed by anyone.

Why do Tarō Okamoto’s most important works keep vanishing, unseen by anyone?

Because these works belong to the invisible world.

The Underground Sun is the god of the underworld. So it returned underground.

Myth of Tomorrow is the visualization of the invisible force of the atomic bomb. So it disappeared from human sight.

And both — when the time comes — appear again before human eyes.

The Underground Sun appeared again in 2018, as a recreation. Myth of Tomorrow was found in 2003, through Toshiko Okamoto’s determination.

Tarō’s works appear and disappear on their own timing.

This, too, feels like part of Tarō Okamoto’s magic.

And now, in the connecting passage of Shibuya Station, Myth of Tomorrow quietly releases its energy.

Among the passersby, those who feel it are very few.

But those who feel it — without knowing it — are drawn into the world of Tarō Okamoto.

And eventually, they arrive at one particular place.

The Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, in Ikuta Ryokuchi Park, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The sacred ground of Tarō Okamoto.

To tell that story, however, one more piece of Tarō Okamoto’s fieldwork must first be set down.

1966. Kudaka Island (Kudakajima), Okinawa. Tarō Okamoto, camera in hand, witnesses Izaihō — one of Japan’s last great shamanic rites, a ritual that would disappear after 1978.

The next chapter tells that story.