In the golden bubble days, when public money flowed like wine at an alcoholic's banquet, the urban landscape of Japan was colonized by sculptural objects of such widely differing quality that some areas took on the appearance of a garage sale. The public was not fooled and has treated these objects with the disrespect they deserve. They have propped their bicycles against them, stuck on fliers advertising this and that and let pigeons deliver the coup de grace.

Most of such public art projects failed miserably in what they had set out to do. Local commissioning authorities did not understand that it was not just a case of buying museum sculpture off the peg and transplanting it outside. The basic principle of successful public art projects anywhere in the past 20 years has been that the process is as important as the final result. When you get it right, you can achieve much more than you aimed to, and a change in the public's attitude to their environment can occur.

One person who understood this early on and has provided the best examples of urban public art projects in Japan is Fram Kitagawa, who runs the Hillside Gallery in Daikanyama. Starting with Faret Tachikawa in 1994 and then the Daikanyama Suteki Hakken (Wonderful Discovery) of 1996, an elegiac farewell to and celebration of the much-beloved public apartments lining one side of Daikanyama, he has set the standards of good practice.