10 Time September 23, 2019
three decades ago, TIME named earth “Planet
of the Year” for 1988, featuring a cover by the artist
Christo of the earth encased in plastic on a beach in
Long Island in New York. For this week’s special-
issue cover on climate change, TIME returned to
sand—albeit this time on the shores east of Tokyo.
Japanese sand sculptor Toshihiko Hosaka and
his seven-person team spent 14 days creating the
98-ft.-by-65-ft. TIME cover on the site of the for-
mer playground at Iioka Junior High School in
Iioka, Asahi. The school, walking distance from
the Pacific, closed after the East Japan earthquake
and tsunami in 2011. The challenges Hosaka
would encounter flowed from the slower, but no
less deadly, changes the cover warns about.
“The biggest enemy of my work is the heat,”
says Hosaka, who started building the sculpture on
Aug. 9, when temperatures hit 96°F. “I have been
making sand sculptures for over 20 years, and most
of my work is outdoors.
The heat has increased
compared to before.”
Hosaka spent one
day preparing the
ground and two days
laying out the design.
The sculpture process
involves raking the sand
for eight hours a day,
which the team did for
seven days, followed by
two days of fine adjust-
ments. The entire cover was then photographed
with a Phantom 4 Pro drone camera shooting
4K video.
“We sculpt letters, frames and earth parts using
shovels, forks and rakes used for gardening,” says
Hosaka, who studied sculpture at what was then
the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and
Music. “It was necessary to always moisten be-
cause if the ground was dry, it did not form. It is
a huge work. I carved it a little and shot it with
a drone to adjust the balance and depth. A dust
spray is sprayed thinly on the finished part. This
spray is used for road construction. This will with-
stand some rain and dryness.”
The typhoon that swept across Japan in mid-
August carried more than “some rain,” however.
With climate change, extremes in weather have
grown more intense and frequent across the globe,
and Typhoon Krosa could have erased the image
Hosaka and his team had labored over for two
weeks. “We were all worried,” the artist recalls.
“But the course changed a little, and we were able
to avoid a direct hit.” —D.W. PineBehind the coverIt took two weeks of
work by sand artist
Toshihiko Hosaka
and his team to
sculpt the design
that appears on the
cover of this week’s
special issue