Tarō Okamoto (often spelled Taro Okamoto in English) made art for crowds. His signature works are not in a gallery at all: they are a white tower with faces, standing in a park in Osaka, and a mural that thousands of commuters walk past every day in Tokyo. For designers working on wayfinding, public space, brand symbols or large-format graphics, he offers a clear lesson: a simple, strange, human figure can hold a site better than any amount of polish.
His work is still in copyright. The Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art open-access collections list no works by him, and the single drawing the Art Institute of Chicago attributes to him is not flagged public domain, so this guide describes his work in text and names where to see it. For public domain images you can reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Tarō Okamoto?
The Art Institute of Chicago records him as Japanese, 1911–1996. The chronology of the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki gives his birth on 26 February 1911 in what is now Kawasaki, and Japanese museum chronologies give his death as 7 January 1996. He was the son of the cartoonist Okamoto Ippei and the writer Okamoto Kanoko, a background in drawing and words that runs through his career.
The Taro Okamoto Memorial Foundation describes how he went to Paris as a teenager around 1929 and stayed through the 1930s. There he exhibited with the avant-garde, and biographies list the Salon des Surindépendants and the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris among his showings. He also studied ethnology in Paris under Marcel Mauss, which the Museum of Modern Art’s research platform post discusses in a translated essay by Okamoto on his time in the University of Paris ethnology department. That training in looking at objects as carriers of social meaning shaped how he later wrote about Japanese culture.
The Kawasaki museum’s chronology records his return to Japan in 1940, following the German invasion of France. After the war he worked in Tokyo as a painter, writer and public figure, and in the 1960s and 1970s took on the large commissions that define his reputation. Two museums now keep his legacy: the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki and the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Tokyo.
Key works: the Tower of the Sun and The Myth of Tomorrow
Tower of the Sun (1970), Osaka. Okamoto designed the tower as the centrepiece of Expo ’70, the world’s fair held in Osaka. It stands about 70 metres tall and remains in the Expo ’70 Commemorative Park in Suita. Its form is easy to read from a distance: a tapering white body, two short outstretched arms, and faces on its front and back, with a further face at the top. Commentators have long read the tower as a challenge to the fair’s optimistic theme of progress; a museum director quoted by ArtDaily describes Okamoto as opposed to “optimistic futurism” and “the cult of technology.” The Taro Okamoto Memorial Foundation documents a restoration of the tower, and its interior reopened to visitors in 2018 with reconstructed elements.
The Myth of Tomorrow (1968–69), Shibuya Station, Tokyo. According to Kyoto Journal, Okamoto painted this mural for the lobby of a hotel in Mexico. The hotel venture failed, and the mural went missing for decades before it was found in 2003. After restoration it was installed in 2008 in a concourse at Shibuya Station, where it measures about 5.5 metres high and 30 metres long. Kyoto Journal reads the work in connection with the atomic bomb and fear of nuclear weapons. Visually it centres on a single figure engulfed in flame-like forms, surrounded by smaller shapes, in hot reds, oranges and black.
Paintings and writing. Okamoto’s postwar paintings, held by the Kawasaki museum, share the same vocabulary as the public works: heavy outlines, saturated primaries and creature-like forms with eyes and limbs. He also wrote widely on art and Japanese tradition, using the ethnographic eye he developed in Paris.
What to look at in a Tarō Okamoto work
- The face as a sign. Faces turn a structure into a character. On the Tower of the Sun they sit at different heights and point in different directions, so the tower reads differently from each side.
- Silhouette first. The tower’s outline, body plus arms, is legible from far away and at thumbnail size. Detail is secondary to shape.
- Heat in the palette. Red, orange, yellow and black dominate The Myth of Tomorrow. The colour carries the emotion before you parse the figures.
- Horizontal storytelling. A 30-metre mural is read on the move. Okamoto builds it around one strong centre with secondary incidents along the length, so a passer-by gets the main image in a glance and more on a slower walk.
- Myth over machine. At a fair devoted to technology he chose an ancient-feeling, totemic figure. The contrast with its setting is part of the design.
Technique: scale, symbol and setting
Okamoto’s method was to work at the scale of the site. The Tower of the Sun was conceived as part of the fair’s central plaza, so it had to hold its own among pavilions and crowds. He did this with a few large decisions rather than many small ones: one white body, one gesture, a handful of faces, and a gold accent at the top.
The Myth of Tomorrow applies the same approach to a flat surface. The mural’s long format, its single dominant figure and its limited hot palette make it legible in a busy station. Its history also shows how site-specific work depends on its context: painted for a hotel lobby, it now functions as part of a transport hub, and commuters encounter it as a landmark as much as a painting.
His Paris training in ethnology matters here. Studying with Mauss taught him to see masks, totems and everyday objects as social signs. His public works borrow that logic: they behave like modern totems, figures that a whole community can recognise and gather around. For the longer story of Japanese visual culture behind him, see our guide to Japanese art, and for how Japanese designers of the same era handled symbols and type, our guide to Japanese graphic design.
How designers can borrow Okamoto’s ideas
- Give your mark a face. Mascots, app icons and wayfinding totems become memorable when they carry a simple face. Keep it graphic: circles, slits and arcs rather than realistic features.
- Design the silhouette at a distance. Test logos, signage and installations as solid black shapes at small sizes. If the outline does not read, no amount of detail will save it.
- Use a hot, limited palette for emotion. A red, orange, yellow and black scheme signals urgency and energy. Build it in the MGD colour palette generator and check contrast for any text set on top.
- Compose long formats for walking. For murals, hoardings and website hero scrolls, place one dominant image in the middle and let secondary details reward a slower look.
- Let the work argue with its setting. A hand-made, mythic form among glass and steel, or an organic illustration in a technical interface, can make a space more human.
Okamoto’s generation of Japanese artists also includes experimenters on a smaller scale. Compare our profile of Atsuko Tanaka, who used electric light and wiring as material, and of Isamu Noguchi, whose sculpture and public spaces also joined modernism with older forms.
Frequently asked questions
What is Tarō Okamoto known for?
For the Tower of the Sun, the symbol of Expo ’70 in Osaka, and for The Myth of Tomorrow, a 30-metre mural now in Tokyo’s Shibuya Station, as well as paintings and writing on art and Japanese culture.
Where is the Tower of the Sun?
It stands in the Expo ’70 Commemorative Park in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, on the former site of the 1970 world’s fair. The interior reopened to visitors in 2018 after restoration.
Where can I see more Tarō Okamoto work?
The Taro Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki and the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Tokyo hold and show his paintings, sculpture and archives. The Myth of Tomorrow is on public view in Shibuya Station.
Can designers use images of Tarō Okamoto’s work?
His work remains in copyright, and none of the Met, Art Institute of Chicago or Cleveland open-access collections has a work by him flagged public domain or CC0. Use his methods as inspiration and seek permission from rights holders before reproducing his images.
