Octopus-shaped slides are very common in children’s playgrounds across Japan, popular for their whimsical, maze-like designs. Installed by the Maeda Company in the 1960s, the tako-no-yama or “octopus mountain” spawned a brood of hundreds of similar slides around Tokyo and beyond in the next decades, and there is even one of those in Copenhagen today. But debates arise when it comes to which park was the trailblazer of this trend. According to the most popular theory, the first octopus slide was installed in Shin-Nishiarai Park in Adachi Ward, Tokyo, in 1965,…
