Hannya Junichiro bronze equestrian statue of Hojo Soun leading the fire oxen, front view

Bronze Heroes of Japan: Kusunoki, Saigō, Ryōma, Hachikō and the Casts That Came Home

By The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team, Tokyo. A Journal feature on Japan's bronze statues and the table-scale casts that follow them home, from the first Western-style monument of 1893 to the yōkai of Sakaiminato.

Every autumn, for about two months around 15 November, the city of Kōchi builds a viewing deck beside a bronze man on a cliff. Visitors climb it to stand at the eye level of Sakamoto Ryōma, cast in 1928 and staring at the Pacific, on the date that was both his birthday and the day he was killed. No other country treats its statues quite like this. Japan learned the bronze monument from Italy in 1876, then made it its own: it melted hundreds for war, recast its favourites for peace, and now casts manga heroes in the same foundries. Our argument: the small bronze on a collector's table is not a souvenir of the monument. It is the monument's twin, and often the part that survived. It belongs to the new Japonisme, where a samurai on horseback and a cartoon policeman share one alloy.

Hannya Junichiro bronze equestrian statue of Hojo Soun with the fire oxen, front view — Hōjō Sōun leading the fire oxen, modelled by Hannya Junichiro and cast by the Shoseido foundry, about 59.7 cm high. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** the oxen's horns on the rocky base are gilded, a night attack's torches turned into points of light.

At a glance
	Japan's bronze hero statues
What they are	Public portrait statues in bronze, called dōzō, and the table-scale casts made after them
First Western-style example	Ōmura Masujirō at Yasukuni, Tokyo, 1893, by Ōkuma Ujihiro
Who taught the method	Vincenzo Ragusa, at the Technical Fine Arts School from 1876
Tokyo's three great statues	Kusunoki Masashige (1900), Saigō Takamori (1898), Ōmura Masujirō (1893)
Where most are cast	Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, a casting town since 1611
The great loss	Wartime metal collection, from 1941; Hachikō was melted, then recast in 1948
Where the record differs	The year Hachikō was melted: 1944 or 1945

An Italian in Tokyo, 1876: how the bronze portrait arrived

Japan had cast bronze for twelve centuries before it cast a bronze portrait of a living man's hero. Temple bells, lanterns and seated Buddhas came from its foundries; the standing public statue of a modern person did not. That idea came by contract. In 1876 the Meiji government opened the Technical Fine Arts School, the country's first state school of Western art, and hired Italians to teach in it, among them the landscape painter Antonio Fontanesi. The sculptor was Vincenzo Ragusa, born in Sicily in 1841.

Ragusa taught modelling in clay and plaster, the Western route to bronze, until he went home in 1882. Japanese sculptors of the day carved wood and ivory directly, so his method was new from the first stroke. He left more than a technique. In August 1882 he sailed home to Sicily with Kiyohara Tama, a young painter from Edo who became his wife and taught at the crafts school he founded in Palermo. She stayed in Italy for half a century. In 1933, after his death, she came back to Japan and gave the works he made there to the Tokyo Fine Arts School. They are now the clearest record of how the country first met the Western statue. One more thread runs through this story: among Ragusa's works in Palermo is an equestrian bronze of Garibaldi.

His best student was Ōkuma Ujihiro, who entered the school when it opened and graduated at the top of his class in 1882. Within three years Ōkuma held the commission that would make Japan's first Western-style bronze statue. The okimono and statues almanac follows the older carving tradition that met this newcomer.

Binoculars at Kudan: Ōmura Masujirō, 1893

The first Western-style bronze statue in Japan shows a man looking through nothing. Ōmura Masujirō, the strategist called the father of the Japanese army, stands twelve metres up at Yasukuni Shrine in Kudan, Tokyo, holding binoculars he has just lowered. The pose recalls a day in 1868, when he is said to have watched the Shōgitai, Tokugawa loyalists, from a turret of Edo Castle as they held out on the hill at Ueno.

The statue took eleven years. The chief priest of the shrine proposed it at Ōmura's memorial service in 1882, and the commission went to Ōkuma in 1885. Ōkuma was already known as a Western-style sculptor, yet he judged the job important enough to go back to school. In 1890 he left for Europe, studied under Alexandre Falguière in Paris and Giulio Monteverde in Rome, and came home late the next year to finish the work. Paid for by Ōmura's followers, it was completed in 1893 and became a new Tokyo sight at once. The pedestal inscription praising Ōmura was written by the statesman Sanjō Sanetomi.

The statue faces north-east towards Ueno, and Tokyo likes to say that Ōmura meets the gaze of Saigō Takamori across the city. The base also carries a scar. A fence designed as bows and arrows, and eight cannon, once stood around it; in 1943 they were removed and given to the Ministry of the Army. The marks of the fence are still on the plinth. It was an early sign of what war would do to bronze.

Copper from Besshi: the Kusunoki horse and the six small casts

The most famous equestrian statue in Japan was a birthday present from a copper mine. In late 1889 Hirose Saihei, the general manager of the Sumitomo house, planned the 200th anniversary of the Besshi copper mine in Shikoku, due the following year. With Sumitomo Tomotada, head of the family, he chose to cast a statue of Kusunoki Masashige from Besshi copper and present it to the Imperial Household. Kusunoki, a fourteenth-century commander who died for Emperor Go-Daigo in 1336, was the age's model of loyalty.

The Tokyo Fine Arts School, then led by Okakura Tenshin, took the commission. It had no modelling department, so the prototype was carved in wood. Takamura Kōun, professor of wood carving, led the work and carved the head. Yamada Kisai and Ishikawa Kōmei took the body and armour. The horse went to Gotō Sadayuki, who had learned to ride as a young man, studied breeding stallions at the army's horse bureau and taken up painting to draw the ideal horse. He then came to Kōun wanting to learn carving. For the commission he dissected horse carcasses and photographed horses across north-eastern Japan to get the anatomy right. The design came from a student, Okakura Shūsui, picked from an open call.

"Where the true spirit of the divine land was about to vanish, it stays, held in a single stone of his monument."
Hirose Saihei, general manager of Sumitomo, on the founding of Kusunoki's shrine at Minatogawa (our translation)

The face was a problem with no answer. More than twenty portraits of Kusunoki survived, and no two shared the same bone structure. Kōun chose a narrow face that read as a strategist's. The armour was researched by the history painter Kawasaki Chitora, who toured temples and shrines tied to Kusunoki to study relics. The wooden model took about three years.

Casting began in 1893 under Okazaki Sesshō. A figure over four metres tall, with sleeves and a sword, could not be cast whole by the old Japanese method of pouring from the bottom up. Okazaki paid his own way to the Chicago World's Fair and walked the halls looking at statues he took for single castings. Late in the fair, light from a window showed him faint seams. Home again, he cast the horse in seven parts, body, neck, four legs and tail, the first sectional casting of a statue in Japan. The bronze was finished in September 1896 and installed outside the palace's Nijūbashi bridge in July 1900. The body is about four metres tall, eight with the pedestal, and weighs about 6.7 tonnes. Its pure bronze is thought to have come through the 1923 earthquake unharmed.

Sumitomo did not stop at one Kusunoki. It went back to the school and ordered six small statues of him. The kiosk beside the monument today sells four kinds of small cast. The tabletop Kusunoki is as old as the monument itself. A Takaoka Kusunoki on horseback, 59.4 cm to the crest carries a crest of silver-faced copper; a Kusunoki signed Shōun, 960 mm long and about 26.5 kg brings the same charge indoors. The samurai shelf holds their neighbours.

A bronze horse signed with the name of Gotō Sadayuki, about 25 cm high on a wooden plinth. We state the signature; we do not certify the attribution. Japonista photograph. Look closer: the lifted foreleg and the swell of the shoulder are the anatomy Gotō learned from dissection.

That horse belongs to a family. A bronze horse signed Gotō Sadayuki shows the collected trot his name stands for, and an early Shōwa quiet horse attributed to Itō Kōku shows how the next generation held the same animal still.

The first unveiling: Saigō in a cotton kimono, 1898

On 18 December 1898, in Ueno Park, about 800 guests watched a cloth fall from a bronze man in a short-sleeved kimono and straw sandals. Among them were the prime minister, Yamagata Aritomo, the general Ōyama Iwao and Katsu Kaishū. It was the first ceremony in Japan to use the word jomaku, unveiling. The man in bronze was Saigō Takamori, leader of the 1877 rebellion, pardoned only in 1889 in the amnesty that came with the new constitution.

His widow, Ito, is said to have looked at the statue and murmured that her husband was not a man like this, until Saigō's younger brother Tsugumichi hushed her. A cotton kimono was not something a gentleman wore in public. The plain dress was deliberate. Ōyama, Saigō's cousin, suggested the hunting clothes after seeing a statue of Garibaldi in a shirt; the idea was to show the man without rank, setting out with his dog and a straw rabbit snare at his waist. The statue stands about 3.7 metres high. More than 25,000 people across Japan paid for it, and the Imperial Household gave a gift too.

The team was the Kusunoki team. Takamura Kōun modelled Saigō, Gotō Sadayuki modelled the dog, and Okazaki Sesshō cast them. The dog itself is a small fiction. Saigō's favourite was a bitch named Tsun, dead by then, so Gotō used a male dog belonging to Vice-Admiral Nire Kagenori as the model, and Kōun had it made larger than life so that it would not look lost beside its master. After the great earthquake of 1923, the statue served as a notice board where families pinned messages for the missing.

Kōun himself was never a bronze man at heart. His masterpiece is a carved wooden monkey seated on a rock, gripping five eagle feathers just after a fight with the bird, sent to the Chicago fair of 1893 and given a prize there. It is now an Important Cultural Property in the Tokyo National Museum, a short walk from Saigō. See our guide to Ueno.

Bronze figure of Prince Shotoku praying for his father, attributed to Takamura Koun, front view — Prince Shōtoku in filial prayer, attributed to Takamura Kōun, 40.3 cm with its octagonal wooden base. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** the hands cross over a long-handled incense burner, the attribute of the sixteen-year-old prince.

Students and a destroyer: Ryōma at Katsurahama, 1928

In the mid-1920s Sakamoto Ryōma was not yet a national hero. The man who brokered the alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū had been dead for almost sixty years and drew little notice. In 1926 a Waseda University student from Kōchi, Irimajiri Yoshiyasu, and three fellow students set out to change that with a statue. They formed a building society and took their appeal across the country.

Two powerful men helped: Nomura Mokuma, called the transport king of Tosa, and Tanaka Mitsuaki, once second-in-command of the Rikuentai, the militia that stood beside Ryōma's own company. The sculptor was Motoyama Hakuun, born in Sukumo in 1871, a pupil of Takamura Kōun who trained at the Tokyo Fine Arts School and had already cast the statesmen Itagaki Taisuke and Itō Hirobumi.

The statue was unveiled at two in the afternoon on 27 May 1928, Navy Day. The destroyer Hamakaze, sent by the Navy Ministry, lay offshore, soldiers of the local 44th Regiment stood at its feet, and about 500 guests watched the red and white curtain fall. Ryōma stands 5.3 metres high in kimono and boots, one hand tucked inside his robe, on a pedestal that brings the whole to about 13.5 metres. The plaque on the back names the builders simply as "the youth of Kōchi Prefecture", with Shimamura Harufumi as assistant and Kadokawa Kenji as caster. On 28 May 1988 the novelist Shiba Ryōtarō, whose books had made Ryōma a household name, sent a message to the statue on its sixtieth birthday.

The hand in the robe is the pose collectors know. A 30.5 cm Ryōma attributed to Kita Toshikatsu repeats it, with gold-coloured family crests and a card claiming an edition of 800. We print the claim as the card states it. Neither the card nor the base signature proves an individual number.

Sakamoto Ryoma bronze figure attributed to Kita Toshikatsu, front view — Sakamoto Ryōma, 30.5 cm, attributed to Kita Toshikatsu. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** the right hand disappears into the kimono, as on the Katsurahama statue, and a short sword sits at the waist.

A boy on every school ground: Ninomiya Kinjirō

The most copied statue in Japan is a child with a book and a load of firewood. Ninomiya Kinjirō, born in 1787 near Odawara, lost his parents young, studied in every spare minute and grew up to become Ninomiya Sontoku, the reformer of farm and village finances. The image of the boy reading as he walks is thought to come from an illustration in a biography by Kōda Rohan.

The statues spread through stone before bronze. In the Shōwa depression, sales of stonework in Okazaki fell fast. The city's masons invited a Tokyo sculptor to teach them, and the figure they perfected was Kinjirō. The first was carved by Nagasaka Junji, a maker of stone Buddhas; the oldest that survives, from 1929, was made for the city's school for the blind and deaf. The masons promoted it at industrial fairs and at national meetings of school principals, and the boy went up on school grounds across the country. The craze peaked before the war and lasted into the late 1950s.

Bronze ones came too, and one carries a lesson in arithmetic. The bronze Kinjirō at Hōtoku Ninomiya Shrine in Odawara was given in 1928, for the enthronement of Emperor Shōwa, by the explorer Nakamura Naokichi, co-author of a best-selling account of his travels across five continents. It was made by the metal chaser Keiji Tanchō, the third of the name. The boy is exactly one metre tall. The metric system was new in Japan, and the figure seems to have been sized so that children would learn the length by looking at him.

Many of the bronze boys did not last. Okazaki Elementary School put up a bronze Kinjirō in 1930; in the war it was removed for weapons metal, and in 1949 its graduates brought him back in stone. A bronze Kinjirō reading under his firewood keeps the school pose at table scale.

Statues called up for war, 1941 to 1945

Japan's bronze age had a deadline. The National Mobilisation Law of 1938 opened household metal to the war effort, and at first collection was voluntary: manhole covers, iron railings. In 1941 the Metal Collection Order made it a matter of law for iron, copper and their alloys. Statues, temple bells, cooking pots and tin toys all went. In 1943 the government issued emergency guidelines for collecting statues in particular, and Tokyo formed metal collection squads.

The most famous casualty waited at Shibuya Station. Hachikō, an Akita dog born in Ōdate in November 1923, met his owner, the agricultural professor Ueno Eizaburō, at the station each evening. The professor died suddenly in May 1925; the dog kept coming. A newspaper story in 1932 made him famous, donations poured in, and on 21 April 1934 a statue by the sculptor Andō Teru was unveiled. The figure was 162 cm high on a 180 cm pedestal. Hachikō attended his own unveiling. He died in March 1935, and a second statue went up that July at Ōdate Station.

In October 1944 the Shibuya statue was given a farewell ceremony and sent off like a soldier. It sat in a warehouse for months. On 14 August 1945, one day before the surrender was announced, it was melted at a factory in Hamamatsu, and the metal is said to have become locomotive parts. A correction to the common story: the statue tourists photograph today is not the dog's statue but its successor.

Some bronze came home. The two lions at the entrance of the Mitsukoshi store in Nihonbashi were made in 1914 by a British sculptor after the lions beneath Nelson's Column in London. Under the metal order they were handed to the Navy Ministry, but by a winding route they were offered instead to Tōgō Shrine, dedicated to the admiral linked with Nelson, and escaped the furnace. After the war they came back to their posts at the store's door.

Recast for peace: Hachikō's second life

On 15 August 1948, three years to the day after the war ended, Hachikō returned to Shibuya. Officers of the occupation stood at the unveiling, and the dog-lovers among them had helped the plan along. The new statue was by Andō Takeshi, the original sculptor's eldest son, who had trained in sculpture at the Tokyo Fine Arts School. His father had died in the air raids on Tokyo, and the original model had burned with him.

Copper was still scarce. Then, in the rubble of an air raid, Takeshi found his father's standing figure Ōzora ni, "To the Open Sky", one of his best works. He melted it to cast the dog. The casting ran late, and the bronze was said to be still warm on the morning of the ceremony.

"Copper was short so soon after the war, so he melted his father Teru's standing figure To the Open Sky, found in the rubble of the air raids, to make the Hachikō statue."
Matsui Keita, curator, Shirane Memorial Shibuya Museum, 2018 (our translation)

The equestrian statue of Ōyama Iwao by Shinkai Taketarō, finished in 1918, was taken down after the war in the purge of militarist symbols. Douglas MacArthur is said to have stopped its destruction out of respect for Ōyama as a commander, and many voices argued for its quality as art. Since 1969 it has stood in Kudan, beside Motoyama Hakuun's statue of Shinagawa Yajirō, a short walk from Ōmura. Andō Teru, the first Hachikō's sculptor, is also known for the uniformed Saigō statue in Kagoshima. One family of sculptors links the two most loved bronzes in Japan.

Takaoka, the casting town: from Maeda's seven casters to the Great Buddha

Most of Japan's bronze statues have the same birthplace. In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga, second lord of the Kaga domain, built a castle at Takaoka in present-day Toyama. In 1611, to give the new town an industry, he invited seven casters and set them up in the quarter still called Kanaya-machi. They began with iron pots and farm tools. By the mid-Edo period they were casting bells and lanterns in copper alloy, and later Buddhist altar fittings and flower vessels.

Meiji brought the world fairs. Takaoka bronzes went to Vienna and Paris and won praise, and the town's ornaments and tea wares were exported in quantity through the Meiji and Taishō years. That is the story of the Meiji bronze vases of Takaoka. In 1975 Takaoka copperware was designated a national traditional craft. The town's makers now cast everything from temple bells to the statues of cartoon heroes.

Takaoka's own monument is its Great Buddha, a seated Amida about sixteen metres high. A wooden Buddha stood on the site and burned in the great fires of 1821 and 1900; the bronze one took twenty-six years, from 1907, and was finished in 1933. Inside the pedestal, the town keeps the scorched face of the second wooden Buddha. Around it the town has set about seventy statues and sculptures in its streets. The method has not changed much since Okazaki Sesshō's day. A clay model becomes a plaster casting model; sand moulds are packed around it, with a core for the hollow; and copper alloy heated to about 1,200 °C is poured in. The film below follows a statue through every stage in Takaoka.

The town's foundries also cast heroes for other cities. The equestrian Hōjō Sōun outside Odawara Station, modelled by Ishiguro Magoshichi and set up in 1990, shows the night attack of legend with torches tied to the horns of oxen. The table piece in our photograph comes from the same school. Hannya Junichiro, born in Toyama in 1931, trained at Takaoka Craft High School, won a Takaoka city prize in 1965 and showed at the Nitten exhibition; his model was cast by Shoseido, a foundry founded in 1927. His Benzaiten playing the biwa, 52.3 cm is attributed to the same hand.

From samurai to yōkai: the manga statue

The list of statues cast in Takaoka reads like a history of Japanese soft power. Warlords and poets sit beside characters from One Piece, Anpanman, Doraemon, Fist of the North Star, Captain Tsubasa and Space Battleship Yamato. Douglas MacArthur is on it too. The foundries that cast Kusunoki's heirs now cast Luffy's crew, and the craft is the same.

The boldest case is in Sakaiminato, Tottori, the hometown of the manga artist Mizuki Shigeru. In July 1993 the town opened Mizuki Shigeru Road, an 800-metre street from the station to his memorial museum, lined with bronze yōkai, the folk spirits of his comics. At the 2018 renewal there were 177 of them, regrouped by zone and lit at night until ten. In April 2024 a 178th joined, the first new statue in six years: Kutabe, a creature with eyes along its flanks, said to quell epidemics.

Tokyo has its own strip. Katsushika Ward, the setting of the long-running police comedy Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Kōen-mae Hashutsujo, has fifteen bronze statues of its characters around Kameari, led by the policeman Ryōtsu Kankichi. A child posing with Ryōtsu today does what a Meiji visitor did with Saigō. For the toy side of the story, read our feature on toys the size of furniture, and our reading of Tiger Mask, the manga hero who stepped into real life.

Know the bronze at a glance

A table bronze is read first by its subject, then by its signature, then by its surface. Each hero has a pose fixed by a famous monument or an old picture, and a cast that departs from it usually has a reason. The table below gives the tell-tale details. It is a teaching sketch, not a measured standard.

Japan's bronze heroes and how to recognise them
Subject	The model monument or image	Tell-tale details	On our shelves
Kusunoki Masashige	Palace outer garden, 1900	Mounted, horned helmet crest, horse stepping forward	Takaoka cast; Shōun signed
Saigō Takamori	Ueno, 1898	Short kimono, sandals, dog, rabbit snare	By request
Ōmura Masujirō	Yasukuni, 1893	Binoculars lowered in the left hand	By request
Sakamoto Ryōma	Katsurahama, 1928	Hand inside the kimono, boots, short sword	Kita Toshikatsu attribution
Ninomiya Kinjirō	School statues from 1928–29	Firewood on the back, open book	Bronze reader
Prince Shōtoku at sixteen	Medieval filial images	Looped hair, long robe, incense burner	Kōun attribution; Kanemichi inscription
Hōjō Sōun	Odawara Station, 1990	Rearing horse, oxen with torches	Hannya Junichiro
Hachikō	Shibuya, 1934 and 1948	Seated Akita, ears up, tail curled left	By request

The prince needs a gloss. The kōyō-zō, the filial image, shows Prince Shōtoku at sixteen praying with a long-handled censer for his father, Emperor Yōmei, who fell ill soon after he came to the throne and died the next year. The image grew with devotion to the prince and became a sign of both filial piety and faith. A Prince Shōtoku attributed to Takamura Kōun holds the censer; a Prince Shōtoku with a Kanemichi inscription has lost it, and we describe the gap rather than fill it.

Signatures need care: a name on a base can mark a maker, a modeller or a later homage, and can be reproduced in a later cast. On surface, the rule is to preserve the existing patina: a bronze polished back to bright metal has lost its colour for good. Condition is graded on the Japanese scale in our guide to condition ranks, and display advice for heavy figures is in our notes on displaying a statue at home. Weight is part of the object: a signed sumo wrestler of about 16 kg stands only 30.8 cm high and needs two people to lift. Western bronzes arrived by the same Meiji door; a harnessed horse signed by Georges Malissard, the French animal sculptor, sits well beside Gotō's.

Opinion: should Japan keep its loyal generals on pedestals?

This section is opinion, labelled as such. Several of the statues in this story honour soldiers. Kusunoki is the model of loyalty unto death to an emperor. Ōmura is called the father of the army, and his statue once stood among cannon. Ōyama rides in uniform. Critics argue that such figures were used to teach young people to die for the state, that they still teach the wrong lesson, and that a modern country should retire them to museums. The argument is fair: a statue on a public pedestal is a statement, and its donors meant it.

Our view is that they should stay, with longer labels. Removal would erase the evidence of what these statues were used for, along with the craft that made them. The Kusunoki statue is also the record of Okazaki's seven-part casting and Gotō's dissected horses. The Ōmura base carries the scars of the 1943 collection. The honest response is to add to that history in words, not to take the bronze away. Readers who disagree have a strong case.

Timeline

Japan's bronze statues, 1611 to 2024
Year	Event
1611	Maeda Toshinaga brings seven casters to Takaoka
1876	Technical Fine Arts School opens; Ragusa teaches sculpture to 1882
1893	Ōmura Masujirō statue unveiled at Yasukuni, 5 February; Kōun's wooden monkey sent to Chicago
1896	Kusunoki bronze finished, September
1898	Saigō Takamori unveiled in Ueno, 18 December
1900	Kusunoki installed outside Nijūbashi, July
1928	Ryōma unveiled at Katsurahama, 27 May; bronze Kinjirō at Hōtoku Ninomiya Shrine
1929	First stone Kinjirō carved in Okazaki
1933	Takaoka Great Buddha completed in bronze
1934	Hachikō statue unveiled at Shibuya, 21 April
1941	Metal Collection Order
1943	Emergency guidelines for collecting statues; Ōmura's fence and cannon removed
1944	Hachikō statue sent off, October
1948	Second Hachikō unveiled, 15 August
1975	Takaoka copperware designated a national traditional craft
1990	Hōjō Sōun statue set up at Odawara Station
1993	Mizuki Shigeru Road opens, July
2024	Kutabe becomes the 178th yōkai bronze, April

Where the record differs

Bronze is permanent; the stories told about it are not. Where accounts differ, we print both.

Two dates, one statue
Question	One version	The other	Why they differ
When the first Hachikō was melted	1944	14 August 1945, at Hamamatsu	Removal date against melting date
Motoyama Hakuun's teacher	Takamura Kōun	Takamura Kōtarō	Father and son share the surname
Ryōma statue's total height	About 13.4 m	13.5 m	Old feet converted, against a rounded figure
How long the Kusunoki statue took	About ten years, 1890 to 1900	Bronze finished in 1896	Pedestal and installation came later
The fire-oxen attack on Odawara	A night stratagem by Hōjō Sōun	A later invention with no firm record	Legend against documented history

Our reading: the twin on the table

Japan's bronze statues are usually told as a public story: a monument, a ceremony, a square. The record supports a closer one. From the first, the makers made them twice. Sumitomo ordered six small Kusunokis beside the great one. A kiosk sells replicas at the monument's feet. Takaoka's casters model warlords for station squares and the same warlords for tokonoma alcoves, and the war that melted Hachikō spared what sat in private rooms. When the public bronze was lost, the private one carried the image on.

That is why a table bronze deserves to be read like a monument. Its pose quotes a site, its signature names a school, and its surface keeps its age. Collectors who learn the poses can tell a Ryōma from a Kinjirō across a room, and a careful cast from a careless one up close. Begin with the okimono and statues shelf and the samurai shelf.

The monument stands in the square, and its twin waits on the table. That is our reading.

Answered plainly

What was Japan's first Western-style bronze statue?

The statue of Ōmura Masujirō at Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo, by Ōkuma Ujihiro, unveiled on 5 February 1893. It stands twelve metres high with its pedestal.

Who made the Kusunoki Masashige statue at the Imperial Palace?

The Tokyo Fine Arts School, led by Takamura Kōun, with Gotō Sadayuki on the horse and Okazaki Sesshō casting. Sumitomo presented it in 1900, made from Besshi copper.

Is the Hachikō statue at Shibuya the original?

No. The 1934 statue by Andō Teru was taken for metal in 1944. The present statue, by his son Andō Takeshi, was unveiled on 15 August 1948.

Where are most Japanese bronze statues cast?

Many are cast in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, a casting town since 1611, whose foundries make statues for squares across the country.

How should I care for a bronze figure?

Keep it dry, dust it softly and never polish it back to bright metal. The patina is part of the object. Lift heavy figures with two people.

References

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