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  • A fountain topped with a cloud and a sword, but which could also be viewed as some sort of cute gremlin

    Continuing a decades-old tradition of mine, I present to you a collection of unusual signs, scenes, and objects in Japan that made me think: “gee, that’s random.”


    Famously, everything in Japan has a mascot. I could have dedicated an entire post to cataloguing mascots, from Ishikawa Prefecture’s (石川県) mustachioed Hyakuman-san (ひゃくまんさん) to Pipo-kun (ピポくん) of the Tōkyō Police. But the mascot that made me do the largest double-take was that of the underground shopping mall Yaechika (ヤエチカ), which is represented by… a chibi version of the Dutch merchant Jan Joosten van Lodensteijn.

    A shopping centre stamp rally card with a cartoon of a bearded European man eating karāge from a bentō

    Jan Joosten says “Let’s collect stamps!” from the various shops in the mall.

    Gashapon (ガシャポン) — capsule toy vending machines — are another staple of the Japanese commercial experience. The vast majority of gashapon sell figurines based on popular anime, manga, and game characters, but there is a long tail of products for niche interests. I myself got a light-up ornament representing the Fukutoshin Line from a Tōkyō Metro branded blind box.

    A gachapon machine containing small bags that look like green onions
    A gachapon machine containing miniature figures of the children's book character Pan-dorobō
    A light-up ornament shaped like a brown circle with the letter F in the middle

    Niche gashapon toys: bags for green onions, figurines from the children’s book Pan-dorobō, and a metro-themed ornament.

    Japan is frequently described as a place where tradition meets modernity, where the old coexists with the new. That cliché is certainly true, but it doesn’t capture the full range of temporal incongruities about the country:

    • Japan’s train system is decades ahead of us in terms of speed and convenience — but many of the actual trains are almost twenty years old and run on sixty-year old tracks.
    • Paying with cash is much more common than it is in Canada — but so is paying with one of a wide variety of mobile payment options.
    • Japan is near the top of the list of mobile phones per capita — but you can also find honest-to-goodness pay phones still operating in the wild:
    An active phone booth

    Although pay phones still apparently exist in Canada, they’re less rare in Japan.

    I was determined on this trip to eat yaki-imo (焼き芋), i.e. a plain roasted sweet potato. I can report that it is a very satisfying snack! There are plenty of other sweet potato flavoured treats at this time of year.1

    A roasted sweet potato in a wrapper

    A roasted sweet potato from a shop called Ms. Yakiimo.

    Other commercial entries in the “Gee, that’s random” files include

    • a face cloth of the Pokémon gym leader Larry folded in a way I found humorous,
    • an ad for tap water,
    • an extremely stressed-out penguin on the packaging for bath bombs, and
    • a collection of stamps featuring historical figures, presumably for teachers?2
    A facecloth featuring the Pokémon gym leader Larry, folded so that only his eyes and hair are visible
    An advertisement for tap water
    A bath salt package featuring a stuffed penguin holding its head
    A collection of stamps, each featuring a notable historical figure saying a quippy line

    Some of my favourite pieces of Japanese media are the Katamari Damacy video games and their Shibuya-kei soundtracks. I didn’t find anything related to either on our trip — I didn’t expect to, considering they’re twenty-plus years old and were niche even in their time — but I did see a bunch of things that reminded me of the game. Case in point: this public art installation in Kanazawa,3 which looks all the world like a katamari.

    Ross pretends to roll a bulbous iron sculpture three times his size
    The Prince from Katamari Damacy rolls a katamari

    The iron sculpture is Corpus Minor #1, by Janne Kristian Virkkunen. The weird character rolling a ball is the Prince, by Takahashi Keita.

    Speaking of things that reminded me of Katamari Damacy, rows of water-filled plastic bottles were a common sight in Kyōto’s Gion (祇園) district. This is an apparently widespread, but ineffective, way to scare away stray cats.

    A row of water-filled plastic bottles laid out on the curb
    A stray cat in Maruyama Park

    There are many stray cats in Kyōto’s Maruyama Park, which nearby residents try in vain to ward off with water bottles.

    Finally, I have a collection of statues that stuck out at me at a particular angle:

    • A doofy dragon fountain at Fushimi Inari-taisha (伏見稲荷大社),
    • A glowing maneki-neko (招き猫) in Narita Airport (成田国際空港),
    • A statue of Maeda Toshiie (前田利家) with a tall gold-plated hat in Kanazawa (金沢市), and
    • A statue of Godzilla in front of Tōhō headquarters.
    A fountain in the shape of a dragon with big eyes staring directly at the camera
    A giant beckoning cat statue made from blue neon tubes
    A statue of a samurai with a tall gold-plated hat
    A statue of Godzilla in front of Toho headquarters

    Gee, that’s a random collection of statues!

    1. I had Seven-Eleven’s sweet potato ice cream bar, which weren’t bad but fall short of my favourite red bean bars. As a side note, I can confirm that the excellent reputation of Japanese convenience stores is well-deserved; we made frequent use of Family Mart and Seven-Eleven. The latter is so successful that it has its own bank and took over the American 7-Eleven, which is now a fully-owned subsidiary of the Japanese chain.

    2. I recognize eleven of the twenty historical figures: Matthew Perry, Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, James Watt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Murasaki Shikibu.

      Many of their exclamations are puns — for example, Commodore Perry says “Perry good”, Newton and Edison have bilingual puns involving an apple and an electric light, and Einstein has a furigana pun indicating that the equation E=mc2E=mc^2E=mc2 actually stands for a phrase meaning “extremely good”.

      Originally, I had confused Bach for Gottfried Leibniz, since they had similar faces and Bach’s pun referencing “Air on the G String” would also work in Japanese as a pun on “area under a curve”. Leibniz, however, had a much poofier wig and would not be filed under “musicians”.

    3. Kanazawa is home to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and has a few related installations around the city.

    2025-01-02
  • A sign reads 'Do not feed the wildlife or birds'

    The implication of this sign is that some of the birds in the park are not considered wildlife. Are pigeons wildlife?

    2023-08-23
  • A sign posted by the Vancouver Parks Board at the entrance to a park

    If you see a coyote in Vancouver, the officially recommended course of action is to yell “Go away coyote”.

    2023-05-09
  • A sign reads 'No Pen Testing' in Muji's stationary section.

    Muji apparently doesn’t have a bug bounty program.

    2021-05-29
  • The general particulars chart of the vessel Queen of Surrey

    “General particulars” is an excellent phrase that deserves to catch on more widely than its current context of legally-mandated notices on boats.

    (Boats are required by international law to have a wheelhouse poster listing their “general particulars”, i.e., a list of statistics, properties, and other bits of information necessary to get a basic view of the vessel.)

    2019-11-15
© 2007–2025 Ross Churchley