When you are meeting someone in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo they will say meet me at Hachiko.  Hachiko is a famous statue of a dog.  If meeting in Roppongi Hills they will say meet me under the spider or “kumo no shita de aimashou.”

The sculpture is the work of Louise Bourgeois.  She was born in France in 1911 and moved to New York in 1938.  The title of this work is Maman, meaning mother in French.  She designed it as a tribute to her mother whom she says had all the best qualities of a spider—deliberate, clever, patient, dainty, neat and useful. The statue is made of bronze except for the marble eggs suspended under the spider’s belly. It is ten meters tall and weighs 11,000 kilograms.