Guest written by Mr Magpie, who has an eye for detail.
Howdy y’all! Those of you who follow my column on Almost Infinite know that I can sometimes obsess over minute details. Every city we visited had a special design for it’s manhole covers, ranging from beautiful floral and geometric design to fun designs with cute logos, and nearly all of them tied to the city’s culture or traditions in some way. Any time we set foot in a new city, I was on the look out for new manhole covers.
Yes, I spent at least part of my vacation on the search for the covers of sewers, fight me IRL.
Nagoya: a cute pond skimmer with lovely concentric circles. Lots of ponds and sloughs had these bugs in them, and the ripples in the water basically look exactly like this. No idea if they have anything specifically to do with Nagoya, but bloody adorable.
Gifu: the cover of Oda Nobunaga’s stomping ground depicts the fishing cormorants for which the city is known. Also, right in the centre of the cover is the civic logo of Gifu, the four thick crossed lines.
Gero: A crane standing on a rock. I saw a rock with a crane on it, and it looked pretty much exactly like this. It also gets points for having a hot springs in the background with little steam clouds. Also, it’s special in that it’s the only thing in Gero without a frog on it.
Takayama: This one had some flowers on it. The one in the picture is neat because someone had taken the time to paint it over with colours. The other ones in the city were not painted, so this one really popped out at me. I don’t know specifically what flowers these are, or if they’re special to Takayama. Whoops.
Nagano: Okay, so most of the Nagano manhole covers had generic floral patterns with apples on them. The northern coast and mountains seem to be where most of Japan’s apples come from, but enough about that design, because the city also has a few manhole covers with the excellent 1998 Winter Olympic logo. Seriously, the Nagano Olympics had such a great logo. Possibly the best logo until the 2020 games in Tokyo! Speaking of…
Tokyo: Such a big city its manhole covers have manhole covers! Just kidding, this one was special. The inner manhole with the flower on it is the one most commonly seen around Tokyo’s many wards and streets. I like to think that the pattern of lines and dots on each petal represents the different neighborhoods and areas of Tokyo coming together for one greater, unified city, but’s likely just the poet/political scientist in me. Also, the inner porting with the four circles on it has different numbers, likely so city workers can keep track of maintenance issues.
Kyoto: Japan’s old capital has two designs that I found interchangeably throughout the city, shown above. Both feature the six-sided design in the centre which is actually the city’s official logo, but one hast the circles and wedges while the other has what look like gears or wheels on it.
Bonus manhole covers! This friendly fellow was in the outdoor area of the Ghibli Museum. As with nearly all things Ghibli, it is whimsical and charming. It has handles for ears!
This was another design I’d see frequently around Tokyo. However, it only had a diameter of about ten inches. I don’t know what it could be for. Part of me wants to believe that Tokyo has small city workers, like the borrowers. More likely than not, though, it’s for cables or lines and stuff.
Okay Mrs. Magpie. Little help here? I don’t remember this one at all. Is this the uncoloured one from Takayama? Womp Womp.
Migratory Magpies 