Drainspotting: 61 Amazing Manhole Covers from Japan

(Photo by jpellgen via Flickr Commons)

As the book explains, design ideas for the specialized covers originate with the local city or council and are then presented to in-house designers at a municipal foundry. Once local officials and the designers agree upon an image, a prototype is created before the final manhole covers are cast in metal. Hirotaka Nagashima, the president of the Nagashima Foundry, explains the process in Drainspotting:

“We carve the design on a piece of wood. Next we put sand on the wood pattern and make a negative sand pattern; then we pour melted iron into the pattern, clear up the iron,…blast and paint the cover black. When we have colored ones they are done by hand and painted with a thick tree resin, colored from pigment. The tree resin sets rock hard and lasts much longer than paint.”

The Nagashima Foundry, which is the second largest in the country, makes about 400 manhole covers a day. The foundry has made over 6,000 different patterns in all. Not every design finds it way to the streets and sidewalks, however. In Camerota’s interview, Nagashima explains how one design of a shrine gate was abandoned when local priests objected. The priests did not believe it was appropriate for a sacred image of a shrine to be driven over and walked on.

Pages from "Drainspotting" by Remo Camerota (Image courtesy Mark Batty Publisher)

As the above images show, Drainspotting is a beautifully designed book. Camerota also writes a blog called Drainspotting, which serves as an online companion to the book.

I’ve also assembled this fascinating collection of Japanese manhole covers for you to peruse. Most of these images were taken by various photographers who are sharing their work through the Creative Commons on Flickr. The unattributed images are from Japanese websites. There is also a Japanese Manhole Cover Flickr Group with over 2,500 images, which is enough to keep an avid drainspotter busy for hours.

Perhaps it’s time for cities outside Japan to rethink their own drain-cover designs? This could be a great public art project in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, or any other American city, and it would be fascinating to see the designs various artists created.

(Photo source unknown)

To see more Japanese manhole covers, check out Remo Camerota’s book Drainspotting, now available as an eBook for iPad, iPod, and iPhone (or you can explore a print copy.)

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(Japanese manhole covers collected by Michelle Aldredge for Gwarlingo)