TAKASHI MURAKAMI'S new show opens with a six-metre inflatable portrait of the artist as a cross-legged Buddha with dirty feet, hairy legs and a scarred shin, his hand stretched out in welcome.
TAKASHI MASUDA wiggles his finger next to an apparently random collage of tinsel, cuddly toys and cutlery, illuminated by a spotlight.
Some say Versailles should not even be showing contemporary art – and its previous programme featuring the likes of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami has gone out of its way to tease conservative sensibilities, as if trying to drive the entire French cultural right to an early grave.
Takashi Koyari had been expected to win handily, but a former lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, Taizo Mikazuki, narrowly defeated him.The LDP's defeat may presage further headaches for Mr Abe.
But Takashi Inoguchi, a political scientist, believes the samurai strain has persisted.
He notes that its biggest unit, Information and Telecommunications Systems, with 73,000 employees, has no foreigners in the top management team, though some of the American executives within it run $4 billion businesses.Under its chairman Takashi Kawamura, Hitachi now has seven external board members, including three foreigners, on a 13-strong board.
Takashi Yanai, head of the Burmese-Japanese joint venture developing Thilawa, jokes that the monastery sitting in a finger of forest jutting into the park has much to gain.
Top artists such as Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami will be grouped in the Premier hall, whereas galleries showing eight works by a single artist will be assembled in the Focus hall and galleries with up-and-coming artists will be in the Emerging hall.Dealers and auction houses have approached the internet warily.
It would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on these areas, reckons Takashi Mitachi, the head of the Boston Consulting Group in Tokyo, who has advised the government on the strategy.
The trouble is that Mr Eckrodt will probably have less authority than Mr Ghosn, since Takashi Sonobe, president of Mitsubishi, is not a lame duck as was Yoshikazu Hanawa, Nissan's former president and present chairman.
Last month 200 dealers, collectors and curators gathered there for the opening of the first showing in the Middle East of work by Takashi Murakami.
