Kawaii gas containers in Japan

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

It is generally accepted that industrial facilities spoil the views of both cities and countryside. But the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun strongly disagree with this opinion. After all, here even such seemingly unpresentable objects as huge tanks for liquefied gaslook very even kawaii.

The popular phrase "a holy place is never empty" in Japan is easily transformed into "every place is never empty." This country does not tolerate emptiness. And therefore, every surface in the Land of the Rising Sun turns into a place for a potential masterpiece of fine art.

One of the main categories of modern Japanese consciousness is the concept of "kawai", translated into Russian roughly as "cute". In this country, even planes are made kawaii, putting images of Hello Kitty and anime girls and Pokemon on their sides.

This Japanese desire to make the surrounding world as kawaii as possible and large industrial facilities did not pass. It especially affected containers with liquefied gas. Surprisingly, in Japan now it is generally difficult to find such an object that has remained intact by artists.

Across the country, there are hundreds of giant gas spheres decorated with paintings. Moreover, the themes of these paintings are very, very diverse. It can be characters from cartoon and other franchises, scenes in the style of classical Japanese painting, and some thematic images (football, baseball, food, origami), and just an abstraction. The main thing is that these gas containers do not stand as faceless giants.

In general, there is something to learn from the Japanese, not only in terms of creating high-tech devices and iconic cartoons, but also in terms of the visual design of industrial facilities, which, it turns out, can be not only aesthetic cancer tumors of cities, but also their decoration.