Monday, January 10, 2011

Land of Cute--Construction Zone

The library is on the other side of the station from here, so we tend to reserve books online and only go once a week or every two weeks.  I don't mind going that way, though, because there's usually somebody in the river--Kosagi or Aosagi, pintail ducks migrating through in the winter, sometimes cormorants.

The other day I came up out of the tunnel that goes under the train tracks to find that the concrete sides of the riverbank were being torn out and re-done.  The open areas were carefully blocked off so that no one would topple into the river.  Blocked off with these:


















Why they felt that the stabilizers holding the poles should be shaped like winking frogs was not entirely clear to me.  I also noticed that I was the only person who appeared to notice these 'tweet wittle pole-holders.  The Japanese simply expect that their construction sites will adhere to a certain level of cuteness.  When I lived up in Tokyo (just after getting married), I used to see the most adorable little...power shovels. I know-- "adorable" is not the adjective you usually see describing "power shovel", but, well,  this is The Land of Cute.  Power shovels must be two shades of teal with purple accents!  I used to wonder whether high school girls were in charge of decorating the power shovels of Tokyo.  The first time I saw one, I checked all around it--I was convinced that there *must* be a Kitty-chan sticker on it somewhere, and  was mightily disappointed not to find one.  I still think somebody vandalized that power shovel....

And those construction safety fences...you didn't think they only made frogs,did you? ;-))

The Year of the Rabbit

4 comments:

  1. Damn! I wish some one would put that much aesthetic thought into our construction areas. We tend to go more for ugly-assed sites.

    Maybe, I should start adding my own flourishes. Hmmm. I have seen several flourishes done by others but would never consider their variations on poorly rendered phalli cute. I think I'll just have to admit that construction workers themselves should never be in charge of decorating their own sites.

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  2. Glad you think it's awesome, too:-))

    KK, I've seen construction sites with pots of pansies hung up all along the wall...and the construction site across the road from my kids' school has put up white boards and provided markers for the kids to draw on (shoulda taken a picture of that!), and apparently they've been taking photos of some of the good drawings, because they've reproduced and posted those above the whiteboards. Does that make sense? Probably not. I'll go take a picture...:-))

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