Will Japan remove nude female statues from public places?

If you’ve visited a park in Japan, you will have noticed that there tends to be a random artwork or two. These statues are often nominally intended as symbols of peace, and feature children playing or vaguely maiden-like girls in graceful poses.

And they are often nude.

The style of these bronze statues tends to be neoclassical, bordering on the tacky. It’s often amusing to watch young kids playing in the park and then noticing the statues, commenting in the crude way that kids do on the breasts and buttocks that the figure is flashing for all the world to see.

The trend for municipalities to commission and install such statues and sculptures in parks, station plazas, and along major streets was big in the Showa years of postwar growth and the bubble economy, but is now seen as an extravagance at a straitened public circumstances in the face of an aging population.

Now, according to a recent segment on TBS News, there is a growing backlash against these statues, which are predominantly young and female. People are calling for their removal and/or replacement with statues that better reflect the aesthetic and moral values of 2020s Japan. After all, it’s apparently not acceptable for gravure idols to hold events in parks in case members of the public see scantily clad bodies, so why is it OK for children to see naked female figures?

Across Japan, municipalities are considering removing such statues during renovations and redevelopment.

Takamatsu City, for example, is set to remove two nude female statues from its Chuo Park.

A dancing nude female statue was removed from a bridge by the city of Takarazuka in 2021 during renovation work on the bridge, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

In the city of Shizuoka, there are seven nude statues of women and young girls around Sunpu Castle Park as well as two others in front of the main train station. The mayor declared that there were “too many” such nude statues in the city and suggested they should be in an art museum. The city is soliciting opinions from experts before determining the fate of the statues.

Calls are growing in Kobe too for the city to reconsider the sculptures that line its central boulevard: there are 35, of which 40% are nude females (just one statue is a nude male figure).

But removal is not cheap and then there is the issue of where to store the statues. The Asahi Shimbun reported earlier this move that the city of Gyoda is going to decide what to do with a nude statue that had been in front of the train station and was removed in 2020, ostensibly as part of redevelopment of the station plaza. It has been in storage ever since but now wants citizens to vote on its fate via a poll done via the phone app LINE.

A similar fate befell a nude statue in the city of Kawanishi, Hyogo, that was removed in 2021. A public poll found that people did not want it reinstalled, and it has languished in storage ever since, reports KTV.