A former city employee in the Fukushima prefecture town of Koriyama has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria. Bothered that perfectly good wood was going to waste after a single use, Shuhei Ogawara — whose job at city hall involved working with the local forestry industry — spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria. An experienced canoe builder, Ogawara spent over 3 months gluing 7,382 chopsticks together into strips to form the canoe shell, to which he added a polyester resin coat. The canoe weighs about 30 kilograms (66 lbs), which is a bit heavier than an ordinary cedar canoe, but Ogawara is confident it will float. A launching ceremony is planned for May at nearby Lake Inawashiro.
During allergy season, I can be found wandering around the house clinging tightly to an oh-so-stylish roll of quilted toilet paper. This way, I can use as many sheets as necessary (and waste not) for my runny nose. Penguin was actually thinking about making me a holster so my hands could be free.
But then I found this hilarious invention—the great Chindōgu masterpiece, the Hay Fever Hat, created by Kenji Kawakami.
Aya Tsukioka’s vending machine skirt is part of a new line of urban camouflage. This piece was originally designed to keep a gal safe while hiding from a potential mugger.
It would also make a pretty cool Halloween get-up.
Ninja and I just got back from the Hokkaido Food Festival at Mitsuwa in Edgewater, NJ. If you can get there, go! We had some great ramen and picked up some other really interesting Japanese food.
When you enter the market from the side entrance, get in the line on the right side for the ramen. It’s miso ramen. The other shop is always there.
“Garbage Bag Art Work trash bags aim to transform Japan’s unsightly neighborhood garbage collection points into instant works of disposable art. Produced by design agency MAQ, the bags come in three patterns—trees, fish and flowers—and they are colored to match Japan’s official color codes for various types of waste, each of which are collected on different days. Green is for recyclable trash, blue is for non-burnable and red is for burnable, so while livening up the appearance of trash heaps, the bags also remind neighbors about what trash day it is.”
