Japan
New in Japan: singing roads.
A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads”, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.
The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or [...]
Tokyo-based PingMag introduces the world to the art of Shuetsu Sato. He’s a guard at Tokyo’s largest train station but sometimes he constructs huge signs directing the passengers where they need to go. He makes the letters for these signs out of masking tape.
His transient tape art became so popular that film artist collective TrioFour [...]
Streets in Japan are notoriously difficult to navigate. Japanese Penguin offers some advice on finding your way when the streets have no names. The bottom line?
[I]f you plan to drive in Japan, get GPS. If you have to walk or bike somewhere, make sure you have solid directions and know exactly where you’re going and [...]
I read a great paragraph in Monocle a couple of months ago that encapsulated the difference between expatriates in Japan and the country’s native residents:
Leaving Japan is like emerging from a cosy cocoon into a harsh, brusque world. Well-heeled foreign residents, frankly, have the best of all worlds: the low crime, the good food and [...]
Charlie Stross, on Japan:
They’ve got our future, damn it.
They’ve got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They’ve got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze — a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene [...]
Three lists:
Metro systems by annual passenger rides.
Metro systems by number of stations.
Urban rail systems by length.
Based solely on these lists, I’m prepared to declare Osaka’s the most underrated metro system in the world.
Photograph of Nipponbashi Station in Osaka, Japan, by Lynt.
The Japanese manhole cover pool on Flickr is worth a quick browse. My favorites: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, & VII.
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