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I can’t quite remember wha these piglets are meant to be advertising. You can see them next to the Lucky Camera shop on he east side of Shinjuku station.

A ceramic Doberman sits in front of some of the 420,000 umbrellas that the police lost and found handle every year.

This lobster was scaling the wall of a building located between Akihabara and Asakusabashi. The redevelopment of Tokyo’s otaku town has been much trumpeted as the start of Japan’s digital renaissance, when in actuality it seems little more than major electronic retailers mussling out the venerable old shops there. Even a short walk from the distrct shows that much remains the same. Small offices and minor wholesalers (beads, toys, ornaments, etc.) still make up most of the surrounding neighborhoods,  going on as they have always been, even as apartment towers wedge themselves in between them.
The second pictures shows a public loo in Asakusabashi.

I found this picture of an octopus made fom crab roll and hot dogs in my hard drve. It’s a creation by Kasumin, queen of the “torture lunchbox” 虐待弁当.

She made these lunches for her teenage son every school day for about a year or so. He would mash them up as soon as he removed the lid — to avoid the humiliation of havng his friends see them — but eat them nonetheless. The vibe that developed between them is why she calls her lunches “torture.”

These are not my photos. I managed to get them from the Shinagawa Ward park department, which oversees these creatures. I am putting it here because I think it’s much funnier than the ones I took. This was taken just before it was demolished to make way for a road.

These slides have been around for 40 years, and there are about 200 of them in Japan. The company responsible is Maeda Environmental Art, which has its headquarters directly across from Issey Miyake’s in Yoyogi-uehara. Funny that.

This is one of mine. It is somewhere in Adachi Ward: