At Tokiwa Bridge Park (15 min from Palaceside Building), I introduced Shibusawa Eiichi's bronze on July 31 — now Asakura Fumio (1883–1964) = photo top =, who cast it.
The 1933 Shibusawa statue was lost to wartime metal collection and rebuilt in 1955 — both by Asakura. He also created Ota Dokan at Tokyo International Forum and Okuma Shigenobu at Waseda.
From 1907 until his death, Asakura lived and worked at the Asakura Fumio Sculpture Museum (Yanaka 7-chome, Taito — 3 min from JR Nippori). His masterpiece Grave Keeper (1910, ~1.8 m) = photo bottom = is housed here. Hearing copies exist in Oita, MOMAT (Takebashi), Fukuoka, and Oita Prefectural Art Plaza gives pause — but originals are bronze casts from plaster; only the plaster at the museum is a National Important Cultural Property.
"Japan's Rodin" — the Agency for Cultural Affairs calls Grave Keeper a peak of early Western-style realism that shaped Japanese figurative sculpture.
The museum is closed for seismic retrofit; reopening planned March next year. The building itself is a cultural property — more on that later.
