Arakawa, Tokyo to the southwest, Bunkyo. South of Arakawa is Taito, and southeast is Sumida. The area was mainly agricultural in the Edo period. In 1651, Kozukappara, the Tokugawa's largest execution ground (now located next to Minami-Senju station), was built. Beginning in the Meiji era, the area became industrial as factories were built on the water front. In 1932, it became one of the 35 wards of Tokyo City. MIAT Mongolian Airlines's Tokyo Branch Office is on the fifth floor in the Tachibana Building in Arakawa. Iseki, a tractor and engine equipment manufacturer has its Tokyo head office in the ward. Arakawa
Shusaku Arakawa formed a close friendship. He started using diagrams within his paintings as philosophical propositions. Jean-Francois Lyotard said of Arakawa's work that it "makes us think through the eyes," and Hans-Georg Gadamer described it as transforming "the usual constancies of orientation into a strange, enticing game—a game of continually thinking out." Quoting Paul Celan, Gadamer also wrote of the work: "There are songs to sing beyond the human." Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee observe, "Arakawa deals with the visual field as discourse, modal systems that constitute the world rather than being constituted by it." Arthur Danto found Arakawa to be "the