So many foreigners "experience" tokyo for the first time through the incandescent images of anime movies or the startling pages of cult manga. It is no surprise, then, that visions of Tokyo taken from Japanese contemporary art have been filtered significantly by Japan's most internationally visible forms of pop culture.1 This, of course, was the strategy adopted with success by Japan's most famous contemporary artist, Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), as curator and featured artist in his landmark touring shows "Superflat" and "Little Boy."2 Many Western curators and art publishers have lined up to reproduce this selective vision of contemporary art in Japan.3 (...).