wanderingmonster

haileybrookeearl:

BANANA?!

We need this today.

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This 2012 AFI interview with Dustin Hoffman has been going around for a minute, but if you haven't seen it yet, you absolutely must.

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Road construction isn't what I would call "cute". It's hard work. Dangerous. Sweaty. There's nothing cute about that. Japan, however, might beg to differ.

Yes, Japanese construction workers are a tough and serious lot. The construction sites, though, often have signs with little anime style characters bowing and asking to pardon any trouble the construction is causing.

Traditionally, the barricades are rather vanilla: pipes connected to a dull-looking plastic stand. However, around 2006, a construction equipment rental company called Sendaimeiban began collaborating with Asahiyama Zoo in Hokkaido to make "character barricades" that could be placed at roadside construction sites and be seen by buses of tourists.

First up was a monkey. It was a hit, so Sendaimeiban started expanding across Japan. And now in 2013, you can see often at road construction sites! Below is a photo I took earlier this spring:

As noted by website Naver, there are several theories why the anime style animal characters are popular. One is that they have a calming effect and can, thus, reduce road rage.

Another theory is that these cute barricades help improve Japanese people's impressions of construction sites—that they're a softener of sorts and construction sites don't seem as gruff and tough. As with many things in Japan, including the language itself, some things become more palatable when softened.

One theory is that drivers don't want to hit the cute animals, so the characters are a form of accident prevention. I'm not sure about that, as whenever I pass sites like this, I end up looking at the cartoon animals instead of the road! I'd also say that these barricades are fun for little kids, too.

And from the increasingly interest online, it seems like adults are also into spotting unusual character barricades.

Now, there are a variety of character barricades, including traditional Japanese style lanterns, little construction workers, or the shapes of Japanese prefectures. And different parts of the country might have different cute baricades! Have a look below.

Photos: kumo-hmlak, heart_cocoro, 写真散歩, 晴れたらいいね, 奈良らん, Soni, 私は興味津々, 自由　気ままに, コーエキのスタッフblog, ボルゾイな生活 , 南風, こんな「飛び出し君」に出会いました！

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond.

A new documentary called Blackfish chronicles the captivity of Tilikum, a 12,000-pound orca whale involved in the deaths of three individuals. The film reveals the consequences of keeping whales in captivity, the effects it has on their psyches — and the ways in which these animals are lashing out.

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A couple professors sound off about the ethics of transplanting one human's head onto another human's body.

But is it ethical?

Before human head transplantation could enter the realm of consideration, scientists would have to perform multiple successful experiments on primates, Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, says. And none of those, he believes, would be condoned by any reasonable ethics committee.

But say the primate experiments did pass the ethics test. And so did the human trials. The fact remains that a head transplant is a bit outrageous for the needs of most patients, Latham says. In the case of quadriplegics, or individuals with full-body paralysis, scientists would perform less invasive surgical procedures before they attempted to replace the patient’s entire body, he says. “If you’d have the technology to attach spinal columns, you’d have certainly developed the technology to repair somebody’s broken spinal column,” he says, laughing.

Which gets at another ethical quandary: doctors might be motivated to perform head-switching operations for all the wrong reasons, Dr. Christopher Scott, a bioethicist and regenerative medicine expert at Stanford, worries. “You’d have to make sure the motivations are around a true medical need, and not some desire to be famous,” he says. “These questions have been raised before, in procedures like face transplants.”

In true bioethicist fashion, Scott notes that the surgery would raise some thorny philosophical questions, chief among them what makes us human: “What is the donor and what’s the recipient?” he says. “We all have an idea of personhood, right? Of what a person is. You know, a baby or a human becomes a person. And this procedure turns it on its head. Is this a person that the body belongs to, or the person the head belongs to? It’s a chimera, a hybrid person. …Those are some of the deeper questions that we should have a real discussion about."