ScreenHunter_143 May. 04 13.10

Imagine yourself out for a hike. You’re feeling pretty good about yourself; you’re about to crest the top of a pretty tough mountain, the cool spring air on your skin, the wind blowing through your hair, the traffic cones towering above your head.

Wait, back up… Traffic cones?

There’s been a spate of gravity-defying traffic cone sightings throughout Japan, if photos making the rounds on social media are to be believed. But, there may actually be a pretty reasonable explanation for them…

You’ll notice the traffic cones pictured here appear to be perched atop bamboo trees. Supposedly, traffic cones are a convenient way for cultivators to mark bamboo shoots for harvesting; bamboo shoots being a pretty popular ingredient in numerous dishes in Southeast Asia.

But, when harvesters forget to come back and dig up the bamboo shoot, the bamboo “trees” (and, holy crap, did you guys know that bamboo is actually a type of grass?!?), can grow astonishingly fast – up to around three feet a day. That means if a bamboo shoot cultivator doesn’t get back to a shoot he/she marked within a couple of days, that traffic cone they laid down will be hovering way out of reach, perched atop the now-adult bamboo tree.

Here’s how fast bamboo trees grow.

We have no idea how people deal with these sky-bound traffic cones, but it appears that the bamboo trees are plenty strong enough to hold them up without buckling or bending under the cone’s weight during the growing process, so our guess is they’re just left there like cute little bamboo dunce caps until the tree eventually dies and falls over.

Source: Hamster Sokuhou
Feature photo: Twitter