Kenzo Tange was Robin Boyd’s first written worked focused specifically on Japan, and the first monograph on Japan’s leading contemporary architect. The book was part of New York publisher George Braziller’s Makers of Contemporary Architecture series, which profiled Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and R. Buckminster Fuller, all of whom worked primarily in America. Boyd had been recommended to George Braziller by Bauhaus founder and former Harvard GSD Director Walter Gropius. Following a trip to Japan that lasted just over two weeks and included meetings with Tange, Boyd returned to Australia to complete his manuscript. The resulting book portrayed Tange as the foremost practitioner of modernism in Japanese architecture, with Boyd writing that “his work in many ways is a symbol of the new Japan.” The book’s jacket design by New York graphic designers Lustig and Reich was developed from a photographic detail of Tange’s Imabari City Hall (1958).