The Giant Spider of Roppongi Hills

Above, "Maman" in all her glory at Roppongi Hills. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Last month, I posted a blog about the lunch meeting I had with the crew of Japan Travel in Roppongi Hills.

We went to a sushi restaurant in the Mori Tower. While walking to the Tower, we passed by a giant spider sculpture that stands in the plaza in front of the building.

If you've wondered who made it, what does it symbolize and why is it there, well, here's the answers.

According to a 2005 article in the Japan Times:

That’s “Maman,” a massive sculpture that looms over the plaza in front of Mori Tower at Roppongi Hills. It is the work of Louise Bourgeois, a French-born artist who has lived in New York since 1938 and is now in her 90s. Maman means “mother” in French, and the artist designed the sculpture as an “ode” to her own mother. My heart went out to Madame Bourgeois when I heard that. I’m a mom myself and wouldn’t be thrilled to know my kid thought of me as something huge, menacing and vaguely creepy. 

But Louise Bourgeois has a more positive view of spiders. “My best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful” as a spider, the artist once wrote. “She could also defend herself, and me.” 

“Maman” was designed in 1999 and cast in 2003. It’s made of bronze except for the white marble eggs suspended under her belly. The sculpture stands 10 meters tall and weighs 11,000 kg. That’s got to make it the mother lode of mother odes.

It was Minoru Mori himself, the developer of Roppongi Hills, who brought “Maman” to Tokyo. On a trip to London in 2000, Mr. Mori spotted an earlier casting of the sculpture at the opening of the Tate Modern and realized it was just what he was looking for.

“We had a very interesting set of challenges in trying to find a sculpture for the plaza in front of Mori Tower,” Fumio Nanjo, deputy director of the Mori Art Museum, told me. “We wanted something memorable that people would want to take pictures of. At the same time, it had to be something recognizable and easy to describe so it could serve as a meeting spot, like Hachiko in Shibuya. But the sculpture couldn’t be very heavy because the plaza is suspended, not build on solid ground. And it couldn’t impede the flow of pedestrians across the plaza.”

Above, another view of "Maman" in the plaza in front of Mori Tower. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

To read the full article, go here.