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Kimono-clad princesses offer their sincere apologies for roadside construction in Kyoto

The fact that the word kawaii has now been accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary says a lot about Japan’s obsession with all things cute. If there’s a manhole cover or a health and safety pamphlet that needs brightening up somehow, you can pretty much guarantee that someone will design a cutesy character or scene to adorn it. That’s just how Japan rolls.

Never, though, have we come across barricades made to look like kneeling kimono-clad princesses before.

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Roadworks video hints at why everything runs so smoothly in Japan

When people visit Japan, they often marvel at how great the service everywhere is. Trains run on time; a guy pops out of a little hatch like a station ninja when you’re struggling with a ticket vending machine; packages come precisely when they’re supposed to, and even if you miss them you can just call the driver on their mobile phone to arrange a new delivery time.

Day in, day out, stuff just works. And yet, unlike the many foreigners who live here, native Japanese take this all completely in their stride. Take this video, for example, which was taken by a foreigner living and uploaded to YouTube a couple of weeks ago…

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Underground pipe explodes, creates a 10-metre man-made geiser in Kanagawa Prefecture

Japan’s Kanto region just can’t catch a break recently – first heavy snow brings the capital city to its knees (and this writer given the X of denial as he was told “Sorry, sir, the flight has already departed” after it took five hours to reach the airport in it), and now giant columns of water are spurting up out of the ground.

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