Changing impressions of Japan

As the semester is about to enter its final week, the time has come to look back and consider how my impressions of Japan might have changed during these past few months.

There are a lot of things actually, but the first thing that leaps to mind is the people. As my language skills have improved (they're still bad) I have become more confident about talking to Japanese that I meet on my walks, and the response has surpassed my expectations. People are overwhelmingly kind, generous and tolerant of my mistake-ridden sentences, and they do their best to answer my often strange questions.

When I came to Japan for the first time some years ago, I thought that Japanese people were supposed to be reserved, but that hasn't been my actual experience at all. This openness might be a Kansai thing, as a lot of Japanese have told me, but I feel like I've been treated the same way in Sapporo, Tokyo and Fukuoka.



Another revelation has been how messy Japan can sometimes be. The rock garden at Ryoan-ji is very stylistically pure and peaceful, but it's not terribly representative of a lot of the Japan that I see around me. The Japan that is cluttered with signs, wires, rusting steel and scruffy-looking apartment buildings.






Before I came here I also expected that Japan would be very new and high-tech. I had read for example, that in big Japanese cities the average lifespan of a building is only around 25 years; that everything is quickly replaced with something newer. In many areas I'm sure that's true, but there are also many examples of the opposite phenomenon - old buildings and stores hanging on. And these places hardly seem to change at all, at least on the outside. They carry the same sign they put up in 1982 or whenever, even if it's worn, faded and totally out of fashion.

I like that. In my home country, the owners would be nervously concerned about what signals they would be sending out if their signs weren't new and pretty. There's an apparent lack of caring about appearances that you often come across outside the major shopping areas that I find refreshing.




This goes for information signs too. I don't know how many rusted or weather-bleached signs I've seen on the streets here. In Sweden they would have been thrown away ages ago, but here they still serve their function. One unit of sign is still one unit of sign, even after wear and tear has made it barely legible anymore, it seems.




I could go on and on, but I need to wrap this up. However, I can't finish without a quick mention of food. When I came to Japan my favorite Japanese food was sushi, but then I really couldn't get much else back in Sweden. Then it was katsudon for a while, but since my time in Sapporo there's one type of food that always fills me with a warm ball of happiness, and this passion has only increased during my semester in Kansai. I am talking of course about ...

PET versus pet

PET bottles. Made of plastic derived from oil, they have some fantastic properties. They can contain fluids with no leakage, they are light, transparent, sturdy and extremely durable. Old ones can be turned into fleece sweaters and with some creative thinking they can be metamorphosed into all manner of other practical things.

They may also be magical.

Something I'm sure many people have noticed and wondered over here in Japan is the sudden appearance on a side street somewhere of a cluster of large, water-filled water bottles secured to the base of a lamp or utility post, or perhaps a group of them stretching single-file along the sidewalk. I've even seen a children's sandbox entirely surrounded by what must have been at least eighty of them once.



Naturally, I've wondered about their purpose. One early theory was a sort of futile-looking, heavily localized fire prevention scheme. Take out those little flames before they spread! Because of their frequent cohabitation with garden plants watering also came up, but was equally quickly dismissed as an explanation.

When I asked around I did get wind of an animal connection.


(Culprit in action. Note broken-down countermeasure in foreground.)

For a long time I let the matter rest, but the other day I finally decided that enough is enough, I must settle this issue. So I went out on a few fact-finding missions in Hirakata and Kyoto. This is what I found.




"They are there to protect the pots from wild cats, there are many of them in Japan," a 60-something woman tells me. "The cats leave their うんち (unchi - shit, feces) in the pots," she explains with a giggle and puts her hand to her mouth. Apparently, the rumors I had heard were correct, the pet bottles are supposed to keep the cats away. How exactly this is supposed to work she doesn't know, and neither does another woman passing by that she enlists for further assistance. "But it's definitely against cats," woman number two agrees.

I can see how that fits with the gardens, but what about the lampposts and installations like the one below?



"They are meant to keep away cats and dogs," explains a 50ish woman that I stop on the street by the above PET altar. She doesn't know exactly how it's supposed to work either, but she does have an interesting theory. Perhaps the bottles' ability to reflect sunlight can scare pets off, cats mostly. Similar to shiny things you hang in trees to keep ravens and other birds away, she suggests.

I can relate to that, since you can now and then see old CD:s dangling from trees in Sweden in an attempt to save some cherries for pie-making. Still seems a little bit like magic though.

She also adds that this is something mainly older people believe in. "Even though PET bottles are new things, the tradition goes a long way back I think."



The heavily protected lampposts now make sense, because what are posts like that to dogs? Message boards for writing on. Fluently.

But does a dog really care all that much about where it does it's posting, I wonder?

Also, I presume that wild dogs are not a major feature of the Japanese urban fauna, but pet dogs on leashes certainly are. So, in order to keep dogs from chatting all over the utility post outside your door, it might be necessary to ward off not the dog itself, but it's controlling owner.

To keep people away however, it seems that you need to combine PET magic with something even more powerful.



This wonderful lamppost I photographed in Kyoto's Demachiyanagi area. Those white symbols look like shrine gates, don't they? In fact, that's just what they are, according to a helpful late 30s woman. "It used to be quite common that people would urinate in public in Japan in the old days," she explained to me in English. "When Japan became more modern, people started feeling that this was not very nice, so they started working to get rid of the habit." Marking previously urination-friendly places with shrine symbols was one creative device used. Who would want to call down damnation on himself for peeing on something holy?

It would seem that someone in Kyoto is still using the method, now adapted to keep dogs and their owners walking right on by.



So, there seems to be a consensus among people I have talked to that PET bottles are deployed to ward off cats and dogs. I have searched for a scientific answer to how this is achieved, but so far this search has been unsuccessful. If anyone else has further knowledge to share, I would love to see it.

Of course, dogs urinating on lampposts is not a laughing matter, as the City of York Council can attest. According to an online article in The Press, a York newspaper, this British town is having to replace 80 street lights per year because of corrosion to their bases, and dog urine is one of the causes. Apparently, neither steel nor concrete can resist its awesome power. Leicester City Council reports the same pressing problem.

But fear not. There may be a solution, and I am proud to announce that it comes from my native Sweden. If PET bottles should prove to be effective only in Japan, some d-level celebrity has taken to promoting Swedish inventor Lennart Järlebro's rubber dog urinals, or so the celebrity press is eagerly reporting anyway. These urinals can, when attached to lampposts, prolong said lampposts' lifespan by up to fifteen years, the inventor claims. Go Sweden!

No pictures of this rubber contraption can be found anywhere, perchance because the product hasn't received a patent yet, but this story from Sweden seems to confirm its existence. Those in great need should keep track of this page, which may or may not be the company page of the celebrity press world famous Swedish inventor.