Bureaucracy can be intractable in Japan; many tasks can be surprisingly complicated as layer upon layer of government officialdom has to be negotiated. Back in the 1980s, the Japanese central government decided to standardise their sewerage systems - seem reasonable, huh? Well, every municipality had different ideas about what the standard should be and this seemingly simple agreement got drawn out into long and complicated negotiations with every party wanting their design to prevail. The manhole covers proved to be a horrendous sticking point. Eventually one bright chap put forward the idea of standardising the shape of them, but allowing each municipality to have their own design on top.
So what was looking like years of bickering and grandstanding turned into an outpouring of local creativity. Each municipality has its own design and many of them are delightful and quite beautiful. Quite amazing for something that's basically covering a pipe of effluent.
All the covers are made in Nagashima Foundry. The original designs are carved into wooden masters which are stored at the foundry. I wonder if they're open to the public. That'd make for an excellent museum trip.
It appears that originally the designs were all just patterns in the steel, but as time went on, the foundry figured out how to add coloured inlays and the regional designers took advantage of this, leading to some remarkably detailed and beautifully-coloured examples. Some of the old plain covers still exist in various parts of Japan, but they are becoming rarer these days.
Many moons ago, I used to run a pub quiz. It was easily the best pub quiz ever until it began to turn into a chat show. I think it was supposed to last an hour but, at its longest, it ran to four. In an effort to avoid smartphone interference, I tried to ask questions that required thought rather than knowledge. One night I asked "Why are manhole covers round?" expecting answers along the lines of "It's to make it impossible for them to be dropped through the hole." But when it came to reading out the answers, one chap decided to dispute my reasoning. When I challenged him with "And I suppose you're a manhole cover designer" it turned out that he was. So I got him up on the microphone to explain the design process and show us schematics. From that point on, I had guests every week and themed question sections around their area of work or expertise. And that's how manhole covers turned a pub quiz into a chat show.
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| Photographed in Hiroshima by M Louis |
These are just a few examples of the huge variety of covers out there. There are books about them, whole websites and there's a
Flickr group dedicated to photographs of them (which is where I got all these photos). Click the link to the group above to see thousands of pictures, including many fascinating ones that I'd have love to included here, but couldn't for copyright reasons.
