Mrs Tsk *

The first tako-no suberidai or octopus slides appeared in Japanese playgrounds in 1968, built by the Maeda Environmental Art Co. of Tokyo. The outrageous pink or red multi-directional slides are now everywhere — you can see over a hundred collected on this page alone.


Few people know the origin of this trend in British 19th century educational thought, however. It was the famous headmaster of Rugby school, Thomas Arnold, who launched a veritable crusade on behalf of the benefits to young minds of these eight-legged molluscs of the cephalopoda class.


In an 1832 sermon preached in the chapel of Rugby School and entitled School Boys Should Mix With The Octopus, Dr Arnold said: “Another way of mixing with our fellow creatures, in a manner most especially pleasing to Christ and useful to ourselves, is by holding frequent intercourse with the octopus. Perhaps, to young men of the richer classes, there is nothing which makes their frequent residence by the sea so mischievous to them, as the difficulties which they find in the way of this intercourse. Inland, many a young man knows something, at least, of his eight-legged neighbours; but by the shore, the numbers of the octopii, and the absence of any special connection between him and any of them in particular, hinder him, too often, from knowing anything of them at all: an evil as much to be regretted on the one side as the other; and which is quite as mischievous to the minds and tempers of the school boy, as it is to the bodily condition of the mollusc.”


It was only in Japan that the message of this sermon was taken seriously enough to warrant, over a century later, the beginnings of a mass octopus-construction programme whose effects on youth are daily apparent to all those capable of remarking without prejudice the politeness, intelligence and social cohesion of Japanese school children, as well as the genial and generous character of the Japanese concrete octopus.