IKEMOKU was the project that took place twice in front of the Statue of Moyai at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, a popular meeting place. While waiting, many people smoke. However, there was no ashtray around there for some reason. Masuyama had an idea to create a new-style ashtray with lots of spines to put cigarette butts so that he could provide smokers a modest pleasure for a moment when they had to kill time.
The work was titled Ike-moku Project, which was named after "Ike-bana" (Japanese traditional flower arrangement) and "Shike-moku" (a cigarette butt in Japanese). Ike-moku Project is a project to try to harmonize a concept of Ike-bana - creating art by putting flowers into the needles of a base - with a concept of ashtray.
In order to encourage people to put a cigarette butt on the object, Masuyama stuck ten dummy cigarettes on it. As a result of that, people understood such a strange, unknown and unidentified object as an ashtray and started to put butts on the spine as he expected. It was a multiplier effect, such that the more cigarettes were put on it, the more the object looked like an ashtray. Naturally enough, smokers started gathering around the Ike-moku.
Eventually, almost all smokers there put a cigarette butt on Ike-moku without wondering why they were doing so. When installed in March 2002, IKEMOKU Project was removed due to rain after about five hours, with 55 cigarette butts.