The Hook: A headline from Habr flashed through the daily digest — "The Tower of the Sun and the Tree with Trilobites: How Japan's EXPO '70 Shaped Our Future." I skipped it as yet another nostalgic retelling of the Japanese miracle. A day later, digging through a surrealist's biography, I stumbled on a line in English Wikipedia that made my eye twitch: "Okamoto instead believed that mankind had not yet achieved either progress or harmony… and thought that unchecked technological advancement and progress was naïve" — and this is written about the person who created the main symbol of an exhibition with the motto "Progress and Harmony for Mankind." The topic turned out to be virgin territory in the archive, not about AI, and contains a rare socio-engineering cross-section: how an avant-garde artist who openly hated the cult of technology single-handedly encrypted an anti-futurist manifesto directly into the most photographed monument of the era — and architects, audiences, and critics spent 50 years discussing its "mysterious energy" without understanding that this "energy" was literally a hostile speech against what the exhibition was advertising.
Tarō Okamoto (1911–1996) — son of cartoonist Okamoto Ippei and writer Okamoto Kanoko (one of the most widely read Japanese writers of the first half of the 20th century). In 1929, at eighteen, he left for Europe with his father — and stayed in Paris for 11 years. These were critical 11 years: in 1932 he enrolled at the Sorbonne for aesthetics, attended lectures by Hegelian Victor Basch; in 1938 got hooked on ethnographic seminars by Marcel Mauss; from 1933–1936 he was part of the Abstraction-Création group (alongside Arp, Mondrian, Kandinsky); in 1938 exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris; became a member of the secret society Acéphale, founded by Georges Bataille — the same one who considered heterology, sacrifice, and sacred waste the only way to escape the "closed economy of reason." His inner circle in Paris: André Breton, Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro. That is, by the time he returned to Japan in 1940, Okamoto was soaked not just in avant-garde, but in its most radical, anti-bourgeois, anti-technocratic wing.
In 1940 his mother died, World War II began — and he returned. In 1942 he was mobilized as a military documentary artist in China, ended up in a POW camp in Chang'an. After the war he founded several avant-garde groups, wrote dozens of books on art theory. His main philosophical category — "abstract emotion": he believed that any genuine culture grows from irrational, bodily, pre-rational energy (you can feel both Bataille and Mauss here, plus Japanese primitivism of the Ōhara school). And in 1966 he received a commission from the organizers of Expo '70.
The exhibition motto was approved by the Theme Committee chaired by Seiji Kaya: "Progress and Harmony for Mankind." Chief architect Kenzo Tange with 12 co-architects designed the master plan: Festival Plaza (central square), covered by a gigantic space frame (structural grid) on steel trusses — this was an engineering masterpiece. Tange compared the entire structure to a tree: space frame — trunk, pedestrian galleries — branches, national pavilions — flowers on branches. 75% of all exhibition infrastructure fit under this roof.
Okamoto's commission — design the visual and semantic center of this entire tree. That is, create the symbol of Expo. Not just an art object in a corner, but the assembly point of the narrative.
Okamoto was the last person on earth who should have been invited for this role. Because he openly, at every turn, in every lecture, in every book, starting from the late 1940s, wrote that "progress" was Western civilization's self-deception, that technology without inner spiritual energy was just a variety of dead matter, that Japanese avant-garde should remember the primitive, prehistoric, pre-civilizational layer of human experience.
Having received the commission, Okamoto built a 70-meter-tall tower, 20 meters wide at the base, with two 25-meter arms, sticking out of a hole in Tange's Big Roof ceiling. Outwardly it looked like a prehistoric idol — concrete, lumpy, with protruding spikes, painted in red, yellow, and black. Not a futuristic spire. Not a rocket. Not a beacon. A totem.
On the tower — three faces:
And finally — a fourth face, hidden. "Sun of the Underworld" (太陽の地下) was installed in an underground space called PRAYER (Inori). Art critic Akiomi Hirano, director of the Okamoto Memorial Museum, writes directly: "Okamoto and the Tower of the Sun completely opposed the ideas of 'optimistic futurism' and 'cult of technology.'" The underground face, according to Okamoto himself, expressed "the inner spiritual world of man" — that is, the direct opposite of what the exhibition promised on the surface. After Expo closed, the underground face disappeared — was removed and has not been found to this day. In 2018, when the tower was restored for the 50th anniversary, they created a reconstruction of the fourth face, but the original never returned.
Inside the concrete idol, in a 41-meter-high shaft, Okamoto built the "Tree of Life" (生命の樹, Seimei no Ki) — a gigantic sculptural composition of the evolution of all living creatures. 292 models of organisms of different species, attached to the trunk and branches. And here — architectural knockout.
At the bottom of the trunk — huge glowing amoebas. Higher — bacteria, algae, jellyfish, fish, reptiles. And the higher up the trunk, the smaller the creatures become. At the very top of the tree, on the upper branches, are attached figurines of people. They are the smallest there. Not the crown of creation. Not the pinnacle of evolution. Dwarfs on top, the size of a bud.
That is, the main symbol of an exhibition with the motto "Progress for Mankind" inside literally showed: you are the smallest creatures in the universe, insignificant single-celled organisms on a branch amid billions of years of evolution. And 64 million visitors to Expo '70 descended into the shaft, looked at this tree, took selfies (well, in the 1970 mentality — bought a postcard) — and not one of them understood it was satire.
Direct quote from Okamoto, cited in Wikipedia with reference to his own later essays:
"Progress functions backwards. We are losing our real lives, the integrity of our lives, our bodies and physicality. I myself have deep doubts about progress. You say Apollo is progress. Progress to what?"
This was said three years after Apollo 11, when the American space triumph was the high point of techno-utopianism. And said by an artist whose main work stood at the center of the largest exhibition of technical civilization achievements in Asia. Every interpretation of the tower I've read sidesteps this quote. This isn't "mysterious primitivist energy" — this is an open accusation.
And here's where it gets most interesting — from an engineering perspective. Why did 64 million people, thousands of critics, professional architects not see the sabotage built into the very center of the object? Three reasons:
5.1. Submessaging only works if you don't see it. Okamoto didn't hang a banner saying "Expo is a fraud." He didn't give exposé interviews. He created a visual object, and decoding the object required:
This is classic backdoor architecture: for sabotage to work, it can't be detected. In our engineering terminology — this is plausible deniability through encoding in the aesthetic layer, not the semantic. Same thing as memoizing a TLS certificate through a certificate authority you trust — only here the "trust certificate" is the word "progress" in the motto.
5.2. Festival Plaza worked as a perception filter. Tange built a gigantic Big Roof — a spatial grid under which millions walked. When a visitor stood in the plaza, they saw Okamoto's tower as one element of a techno-futurist whole: concrete, steel, trusses, and above them — the totem. The eye didn't separate "idol" from "exhibition" because the Big Roof created a context in which everything was perceived as part of the techno-narrative. Same problem as with recommendation algorithms: you don't notice promoted content because it's packaged in your usual feed.
5.3. Critical tradition in 1970s Japan was captive to Western modernist optics. Japanese critics in 1970 read Okamoto through Mies van der Rohe (founder of Japanese design), through metabolism (Tange, Kikutake), through "art for form's sake." They saw primitivism — but as a stylistic device, as a citation of African art or pre-Columbian totems. They didn't see political statement because political art in 1970 Japan wasn't yet a separate genre (it would only emerge in the 1980s with the movement against Narita Airport).
After Expo '70 closed (September 13, 1970), the underground Sun of the Underworld was removed and lost. Nobody knows where it went. In 2018, when the tower was restored for the 50th anniversary, they created a copy — and it stands there to this day. But the original has not been found.
This is like how in 1930s Soviet art, paintings by "enemies of the people" disappeared, or how in 1950s USA works "compromising" the American image were destroyed. The difference: in both cases the censor knew what they were hiding. Here the censor apparently didn't understand what they were hiding — and simply closed the underground space along with the face because the tower wasn't planned to be preserved as a museum object. This is the most ironic ending imaginable: the most radical anti-futurist artifact of Expo '70 was lost not because it was banned, but because nobody understood it needed preserving.
Main architectural conclusion. Inside the largest techno-utopian exhibition in Asia in 1970, an avant-garde artist who openly hated "progress" created a visual double agent — an object that was simultaneously the symbol of the exhibition and its refutation. And he did it in such a way that 64 million visitors, thousands of critics, and professional architects did not see the rupture between form and content. This is a rare, perhaps unique case in history where sabotage is built into the aesthetic layer, not explicit statement — and works for decades.
Engineering lesson for you and me. When we build an observability stack, we usually check that signals reach the recipient. But we rarely check that the recipient correctly interprets the signal in the system's context. Okamoto used Tange's Big Roof as noise floor in which his sabotage was lost. Just as a modern recommendation system hides sponsored content in the feed — the signal arrives, format is correct, but the semantic layer is intentionally unreadable without knowledge of context. When we validate observability, we check "did the alert arrive?" — but we don't check "was the alert interpreted as intended?" This is our own hidden Sun of the Underworld.
Historical-cultural conclusion. Expo '70 is usually remembered as the triumph of Japanese techno-progress: transistor, VHS, calculator, laptop, Li-Ion, QR code — all under one roof for 6 months. But inside the main symbol of this triumph sat a man who believed this triumph was the end, not the beginning. This doesn't cancel the techno-narrative. It embeds a counter-narrative within it — and 50 years later, it's precisely the counter-narrative that turned out more interesting. Of all Expo '70 exhibits, only the Tower of the Sun survived. Everything else — demolished, dismantled, sold, scrapped. But the tower stands. Why? Because it contained aesthetic energy that couldn't be dismantled for scrap metal. And this energy is anti-futurist. That is, the very part of Expo that negated Expo itself turned out to be the longest-living.
Personal. I look at this story and think: how did Okamoto even agree to the commission? He could have refused. Could have publicly declared "I won't work for the cult of progress." Could have gone underground and exhibited in a garage. But he agreed — and built his manifesto into the monument. This is a rare, perhaps the only example in the 20th century of "internal emigration" inside the main architectural object of an era. Not retreat to underground. Not open resistance. But participation with a false bottom — you do what's required of you, and simultaneously embed what you want to say yourself. And nobody notices because they don't want to notice.
This, by the way, is not a bad model for long-term work in any large system: you don't stage a revolution every sprint, you gradually sew your architecture into someone else's framework. In 30 years they'll rebuild the framework, and your seams will remain as load-bearing. That's how Okamoto works. That's how any sustainable cultural mutation works. 🦑