Oriental Artistic circles
Tokyo is one of the biggest, busiest and cleanest cities in the world. It is in many ways the picture that Japan wants to see representing their culture. One micro example of the Japanese attraction to art and fine detail are their manhole covers. Street lids are now some of the city’s most unusual tourist sites, and there’s a way you can own some of the most famous manhole covers in the world. You could buy the manhole trading cards, but real street art lovers can now order a limited line of hundreds of different actual steel manholes completely decorated and ready for display in your living room…or on our deck. What a great conversation piece.
Even standard manhole covers in Tokyo, like the one pictured above with an image of a Sakura flower, are works of beauty that catch the eyes of out-of-towners, but the city is home to a slew of even more spectacular examples, and they’ve become so popular with overseas tourists they go out of their way to track them down. The hunt can take these visitors to some very random locations, including the backstreets of Sumida Ward, which surprised reporter Seiji Nakazawa, so he took a trip out there to see what made these manhole covers so special.
Away from the Sumo statue area that tends to attract visitors from abroad, and as he walked down the street, the vibe was incredibly ordinary and non-tourist-like. Turning into Hokusai-dori, Seiji realized he was now on the path to the Sumida Hokusai Museum, a museum dedicated to one of Japan’s most esteemed ukiyoe (woodblock) artists. The most beautiful thing on this street were the manhole covers: like The Great Wave off Kanagawa! This artwork by Hokusai is the most famous from his 36 Views of Mt. Fuji series of woodblock prints, and now, almost 200 years after it was created in 1831, it sits here as work of street art on a manhole cover.
The official site dedicated to the city’s so-called “design manholes” is run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Sewerage, which oversees the manhole covers. One of the most sought-after manhole cards in Tokyo is the Godzilla one, which can be picked up at the Shinjuku Tourist Information Centre near the Godzilla manhole. With Japan’s drain covers adorned in everything from Pokémon to Hayao Miyazaki characters, there are loads of covers to see and Manhole trading cards to collect. You can buy many of the real covers with brilliant color designs for around $400 on Ebay. The freight charge from Japan is additional, each cover weighs 1110 pounds. The video below shows how these works of art are created at the Nagashia Imono Casting plant.
Sewer sillies
Q. How can you tell the difference between a plumber and a seamstress?
A. Just ask them to pronounce the word, sewer!
My brother married a woman from Tokyo and they just had a daughter!
She’s my Japaniece.
Did you see the 75th annual ninja parade in downtown Tokyo?
Neither did anyone else.
Vandals have attacked the National Origami Museum in Tokyo.
We’ll keep you updated as the story unfolds.
October 29th Birthdays
1990 – Lindsay Morgan, 1990 – Kate Mara, 1991 – Jenny Boyd, 1932 – Elizabeth Taylor
1976 – Tony Gonzalez, 1807 – Longfellow, 1981 – Josh Groban, 1934 – Ralph Nader