Gee, that's random: Japan
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 17th century Dutch merchant Jan Joosten van Lodensteijn.
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.
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 I also saw several honest-to-goodness pay phones still operating in the wild:
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.
Other commercial randomness include:
- A collection of stamps featuring historical figures.
- An extremely stressed-out penguin on the packaging for bath bombs.
- A face cloth of the Pokémon gym leader Larry folded in a way I found humorous.
- An ad for tap water, which I fully endorse.
Unfortunately, I didn’t come across any Katamari Damacy merch to add to this collection. (I didn’t expect to, considering the original game is twenty-plus years old and was niche even in its time.) But I did see a bunch of things that reminded me of the series, like this public art installation in Kanazawa.
In Katamari, the streets are covered in random objects for you to roll up. Obviously, this isn’t the case in real life, except… I kept running into neatly-arranged rows of water-filled plastic bottles on the ground! I looked this up and they’re apparently a widespread but ineffective way to scare away stray cats.
Finally, I have a collection of statues that stuck out to me.
- 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).
- A statue of Godzilla in front of Tōhō headquarters.
