The Japanese architect Kenzo Tange (born 1913), a student of Le Corbusier, was one of the first modern architects in Japan and played an important design role in postwar rebuilding of Japanese cities.

Kenzo Tange was born in 1913 in the town of Imabari on Shikoku, the smallest of the four principal islands in the Japanese archipelago. He received his degree in architecture from the University of Tokyo in 1938 and returned to the university to do graduate studies in urban planning and design between 1942 and 1945. The four intervening years were spent in the Tokyo architectural firm of Kunio Maekawa, who had worked in the Paris office of the great Swiss architect Le Corbusier and who was one of a small number of modern architects in Japan at the time. Thus, at the end of World War II Tange was equipped to play a major design role in the reconstruction of...