November 17, 2010

Japan is absolutely full of corky and random things. For one, I find it amazing that I can walk down the street or being walking around indoors and see a vending machine for pretty much anything that I want–depending on my location of course. Snacks, drinks–both chilled and warmed, ice cream, toys, cigarettes, panties, deserts, and almost anything you could buy at a convenience store. The variety of those items is broad as well. For example drinks could range from a simple soda or hot chocolate or tea or even a milkshake! But this convenience does sacrifice the cheapness of the time, because you could buy the same drink in a store for about 50-100yen cheaper (about .50cents to a dollar).

Here is a picture of an ice cream vending machine inside a train station.

Their creative weirdness is quite amusing sometimes as well, and their design for some of their things is neat too, like their cars and trucks for example. The cars, coming from my American perspective, all look like adorable toys to me–well, the newer ones at least. Their new cars are incredibly compact but just have the shape and look of a toy, and they keep their cars so clean it just looks like a fake-car to me. Their older ones however do have more of a ‘normal’ look to them, but I have to say their MPG for their cars is quite outstanding, at least for the cars built for urban use. Their trucks are quite the site too, at least during the night time. In America the lights on trucks tend to be a single blend of orange or red lights, but in Japan trucks have almost any of the basic colors you can think of. I even saw a few rainbow trucks as I called them, which consisted of green, blue, red, yellow, and purple lights all on a single truck in different areas. And yes, all of their cars and trucks are much smaller than ours. But they have to be with Japans ultra narrow roads in the urban areas.

Speaking of cars and creativeness, I thought the one parking area had a humorous way of designating parking sections. Instead of using numbers or letters, they use fruit. For instance, this picture displays parking section “Melon”.

Here is vending machine inside an arcade. It specialized in popcorn, fully equipped with butter and caramel dispensers.

Location: Japan