The Runner Who Never Finishes: 90 Years and Six Signs at Dotonbori

A plane of blue light lies reflected in the Dotonbori canal at night. Both arms raised, one leg kicked up as he dives across the finish line — the runner in the red running shirt goes on running for ever, wavering in the ripples of the water. In front of this sign, which stands at the foot of Ebisubashi, people strike the same pose and hold up their phones. The runner with both arms up and the tourists with both arms up face one another across the canal. It is a corporate advertising sign, and yet not one of those who gather there has a Glico product in mind. The Dotonbori Glico Sign, its status as advertising very nearly forgotten, stays lit as the single most photographed screen in Osaka's Minami.

No product name, no price, no campaign. What appears is only the one runner, and behind him a scene of light that keeps changing. When advertising stops being advertising and becomes something the city holds in common, where does the border between a sign and an exhibition lie? This one surface, which has kept running in the same place for ninety years, answers that question by a route entirely unlike the commissioning of a work.

The Same Runner, Rebuilt Six Times

The first Glico neon tower rose at Dotonbori in 1935. Thirty-three metres tall, its neon tubes in six colours said to have flashed nineteen times a minute, this first-generation sign was an advertising tower of extraordinary scale for its day. The tower of light that had appeared beside Ebisubashi became a landmark of Osaka's Minami almost at once. But under the wartime requisition of metal it was taken down in 1943. The runner vanished from the city once.

The second generation, raised in 1955 after the war, carried a stage beneath the sign. On that platform, set at the height of Ebisubashi, fashion shows and rockabilly events were held. It was a period in which the advertising tower was itself a place where people gathered. With the third generation, in 1963, the sign became a fountain: 12 tonnes of water in circulation, thrown upward through 150 nozzles under 400 coloured lamps, with the spray recorded as carrying all the way to the bridge on windy days. A sign that moved, made noise and scattered water — long before today's LED staging, the sign in this place had been refusing to be a "static plane".

The fourth generation, of 1972, stayed on this building's wall for twenty-four years, the longest run of any, and fixed the design of the runner close to its present form. The fifth, of 1998, was the culmination of neon: roughly 5,100 metres of tubing in total, 4,460 neon tubes drawing the runner and the word "Glico", with Osaka landmarks — Osaka Castle, the Kaiyukan aquarium, the Osaka Dome, Tsutenkaku — surfacing in the background. Then, in October 2014, every neon tube of the fifth generation was stripped out and the sixth, built from some 140,000 LED chips, was lit. Twenty metres tall and 10.38 metres wide, the surface was no longer a fixed picture but a single display able to carry moving images. The wordmark above it was given a new design in June 2022.

Counting from the first, the same runner has been rebuilt six times in the same place. The light source shifted from neon tube to water and then to LED; the technology of drawing was replaced at the root. Still the runner's pose does not change. This "Goal-In Mark" — both arms raised, one leg kicked up, diving across the line — is said to derive from the founder finding "healthiness" in the sight of a child running into the finish at a school sports day. For ninety years the city has not let go of this one posture.

An Advertiser Editing Its Own Sign

The operation of the Dotonbori Glico Sign is different in character from the ordinary posting of advertising. This is not a surface like the large vision boards of Piccadilly Circus, where several advertisers buy slots and divide the time among them. Here there is only one advertiser. Ezaki Glico owns the building's wall itself, and edits its own sign with its own hands. Since there are no slots to sell, no other company's advertising ever runs. What appears is always the runner, and a background Glico has chosen.

The switch to LED raised the freedom of this "self-editing" by a further degree. Through the lit hours, from roughly thirty minutes after sunset until midnight, the background does not stand still. Footage of the runner racing through the famous places of the world, scenes of the season, limited videos for an anniversary — Glico has swapped out the contents of its own sign as the occasions have arisen. In 2022, for the company's centenary, a limited-run video celebrating it was played across this surface. The sign becomes, among other things, a device for celebrating a company's own chronology over the scenery of a city.

What this surface edits, though, is not only the company's own anniversaries. In 2020, when the racing driver Takuma Sato took his second victory at the Indianapolis 500, a Goal-In Mark in Sato's likeness was raised on the Dotonbori Glico Sign. After his first win in 2017, social media had told him that it would be perfect if only he lifted his leg; Sato promised that next time he really would, and after the 2020 victory he produced the pose — and from 4 September that promise was kept on the city's sign. A surface built for advertising turns, for a few days, into a public noticeboard carrying the city's good news. Nobody asked for it: the advertiser, on its own judgement, laid its own runner over a single individual.

Meaning Made by Duration, Not by Commission

This journal has so far followed the routes by which art rises up on a screen chiefly as "acts of editing". At the Shibuya scramble crossing, four large vision boards linked together for the sake of advertising are surrendered to art for one hour late at night. In Shinjuku, the calico cat on Cross Shinjuku Vision has taken up residence on an advertising surface as the operator's own editorial work. London's Piccadilly Lights constitutes its art slot through the owner's "donation" of a few minutes each night. All of them are attempts to re-edit the operating hours of existing advertising infrastructure toward another purpose.

The Dotonbori Glico Sign stands on the same "border between advertising and exhibition" as these, and yet its constitution is decisively different. There is no commission to an outside artist here, no open call, no donation of an art slot. The footage that gets swapped in is, throughout, the advertiser's own runner, made by the advertiser for itself. Even so, there is no doubting that this surface functions as something the city holds in common. People do not gather here and strike the pose because they want to buy a Glico product. They gather toward the duration itself — toward the fact that the same runner has gone on standing in the same place for ninety years.

What is at work here is another principle, neither commission nor open call. Duration and repetition turn a single sign into the memory of a city. Lit every night, changing its background with the seasons, rebuilt six times and never once changing the pose, holding up one posture for ninety years — this thickness of time has turned an advertising surface into a "picture" that passers-by take on as part of their own city. Its quality as a work lies not in the strength of any individual video, but in the very continuity of an operation that has kept renewing the same runner without ever letting go of it.

Two concepts to which this journal returns again and again lie over this reading. The first is ma (間), the interval — the blank that advertising has opened on the night riverside by ceasing to sell a product. The second is tenkei — the small presence that sets meaning into that blank, like the tiny figure or the boat brushed into the vast landscape of an ink-wash painting. Within the scenery of the Dotonbori night, the single runner has gone on being, for ninety years, a tenkei that kindles meaning in the city. Advertising that has stopped selling a product has turned into a small presence that brings a landscape to life.

A Surface the City Took On

The Dotonbori Glico Sign is one form of the digital signage a consumer experiences directly, and yet what it actually amounts to is a record of operation: of how an advertiser has edited its own sign, and how long it has gone without letting go of it. The City of Osaka, too, presents this sign as one of the landmarks of the Dotonbori canal. A single surface owned by a company and edited by a company has, at some point along the way, come to be counted by the administration as part of the city's landscape, and taken on by passers-by as the scenery of their own city. The subject of both ownership and editing has remained a private company throughout — and yet the meaning kindled there became public long ago.

Unlike an exhibition that appears at a crossing for one hour after the last train, or an art slot donated for a few minutes each night, this runner does not go away. It lights when the sun goes down, goes dark by the next morning, and lights again when the sun goes down — ninety years of that repetition have turned a single advertising sign into a tenkei of the city. When one rereads a city as a museum, the quietest and longest-running exhibition of all may, unexpectedly, be a single sign that everybody knows to be an advertisement. That runner, arms raised, diving across the line, has still not finished, ninety years on.

Sources

1. fig.001道頓堀グリコサイン 特別映像 (85秒) — Glico Japan 江崎グリコ 公式(YouTube)
2. fig.002100周年ありがとう、道頓堀グリコサインに限定映像 — 産経ニュース(YouTube)
3. fig.003大阪・道頓堀グリコサイン 佐藤琢磨が優勝記念に「ゴールインマーク」 — THE PAGE(YouTube)
4. [4]道頓堀グリコサイン — 【公式】江崎グリコ(Glico)
5. [5]6代目「道頓堀グリコサイン」完成 LEDを採用して多彩な映像も楽しめます — 【公式】江崎グリコ(Glico)
6. [6]佐藤琢磨選手のインディ500優勝祝福メッセージを道頓堀グリコサインにて放映 — 江崎グリコ株式会社 プレスリリース
7. [7]道頓堀グリコサイン — 大阪市中央区
8. [8]道頓堀グリコサイン — Wikipedia (a list of installation years and specifications for each generation)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Ezaki Glico Co., Ltd.

LOCATION

Japan

MODEL

Corporate programme — Not an external artist commission but the advertiser editing its own sign: no open call or commission fee is involved, and special videos are swapped in as anniversaries and public occasions arise

CADENCE

Permanently installed; lit from roughly 30 minutes after sunset until midnight, with special videos aired as anniversaries and public occasions arise

SPEC

The sixth (current) sign is 20.00 m tall and 10.38 m wide, with roughly 140,000 LED chips, on the wall of the Ezaki Glico building facing the Dotonbori canal at Ebisu Bridge

SINCE

1935

STATUS

Active — The current sixth-generation sign, switched to LED, was installed in October 2014; the Glico wordmark above it was redesigned in June 2022

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