The Beauty of Japan's Lonely Vending Machines (cnn.com) 128
Jacopo Prisco, writing for CNN: Vending machines are a mainstay of Japanese culture. There are over 5.5 million in the country -- one for every 23 people, the highest ratio in the world. They're ubiquitous and almost always outdoors, making them immediately stand out to anyone visiting Japan. They sell nearly everything -- including some rather peculiar items. Most are stocked with hot and cold drinks. Some have funny English names, like "Pocari Sweat" or "Calpis Water." At night, rather than switching off, the machines come to life with vibrant colors and bright lights. Photographer Eiji Ohashi has spent years photographing them across Japan in the dead of the night, and now he has brought the images together in a book titled "Roadside Lights." For Ohashi, the machines once served as beacons: "I started this project nine years ago, when I noticed a shiny vending machine near my home as I was coming back from my night shift," he said in an email interview. "At the time, I was living in a town in the north of Japan that would get hit by terrible blizzards during the winter months. I'd drive my car in (these) conditions and use the light of the vending machines to guide me."
Because it's Japan (Score:5, Insightful)
And nobody vandalizes them, because it's Japan.
They had great iced coffee in cans, with brands like "Georgia", long before Starbucks and other US companies ever had canned and bottled coffee products.
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Oh yeah, because Japan doesn't have vandalism. I love how westerner white tech guys idolize Japan because they don't really know it, just visited it.
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I lived there, they have way less vandalism.
Kids buying liquor? No:Because it's Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
The vending machines in Japan are amazing with all the stuff that's in them - including hard liquor.
I was in Japan almost twenty years ago with a couple of co-workers and outside the hotel, there was a vending machine selling various types of liquors. We were looking at them when a policeman (who fortunately spoke English) walked up.
We asked how they kept kids from buying the alcohol from the machine? The policeman said that would be wrong. We agreed, that it would be wrong, so how did they stop kids from buying booze? The policeman said children buying liquor would be wrong.
This went around a few times until we realized that he couldn't conceptualize the idea that kids wanting to try liquor would do something wrong like buy it from the vending machine. Not a problem.
Re:Kids buying liquor? No:Because it's Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Kids buying liquor? No:Because it's Japan (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't get plundered because they either don't put them in places which are prone to crime, or the local gangs are the ones running them.
Japan has plenty of vandalism and other crime, they're just more orderly about it and criminals are generally smart enough to not rock the boat.
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don't put them in places which are prone to crime.
So... Japan?
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I must admit, I chuckled.
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70 cl = 70 cubic liter?
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Yeah, it's because it's not SI. Not because it's an odd designation like cl when anyone else would denote it as 700ml
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I don't remember seeing dl used anywhere.
In Sweden, dl is very common. For example, all cooking recipes use dl (for smaller volumes we use weird ones like table-spoon (15 ml) and seasoning-measure (1 ml)). Liquor is always assumed to be in cl unless specified.
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My kid was doing his homework and I had to think about the decis and hectos. I know what they are, but in practice we seem to use the 3 powers and skip the others. So if it's too big for mm, use m.
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Cubic liters are 6 dimensional!
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Isn't it 9?
Re:Kids buying liquor? No:Because it's Japan (Score:4, Informative)
Japan's a different planet... and if you're surprised at their ways, imagine their shock when they first visit the west.
Japan seems to be a different planet in many ways, very nice in some ways but rather backwards in others. I know when my daughter went there as part of a school-sponsored summer trip some years ago, she and the other girls came back talking about how uncomfortably mysoginistic certain aspects of the culture were - like how whenever they were on a crowded train, they could pretty much count on some guy thinking it was okay to attempt to reach through the crowd and grab a breast.
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You're feeding a troll, probably a racist one. Japan is nowhere close to 99% homogeneous, except maybe in a few of the dying villages in the boondocks. When there are only 7 families living there, they do tend to get pretty uniform.
I actually spent a year and some shorter periods in places that are considered inaka (rural hometowns) among the inakamono (country bumpkins), and even there it wasn't close to 99%.
Funniest counterexample is actually an old joke from a book called From Bonsai to Levis by George
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It used to be America's greatest strength that most Americans sincerely believed that ANYONE could become an American.
That was a different time, when people wanted to assimilate. They went a little too far with it in some cases, like not teaching their kids their language, but that does demonstrate how strongly they felt about becoming a part of American society.
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Did you know there are still several German-speaking communities in Texas? Turns out they are finally fading away now, but for a while German had the same legal status as Spanish. About 10% of the population of Fredericksburg at this late date.
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That's simply because they haven't hopped on the diversity train, right?
How is it in 2019 a country is ALLOWED to be 99% homogeneous? Don't they realize the benefits to be had by being more diverse?
Double diversity bonus points would be if the Japanese imported people from cultures as diametrically opposed to their own as possible.
Do i smell racist shit?
UNLIKE many parts of the world, the United States of America was NEVER a country of one culture, or one race.
EVERYONE here came from OTHER places most of them willingly. ACCEPT of course for the indigenous peoples we slaughters to claim it as our own. And the hundreds of thousands that were FORCED to come here from Africa.
Don't be a dickhead.
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I'd argue that immigration policy to the US until the 1950's or so pretty much implicitly added an addendum of "as long as you're european" to 'e pluribus unum' -- but seriously why is it that 'diversity' is so heavily pushed here in the US and western europe as a goal in-and of itself, but not in other places?
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Except that there are *some* kids that will go and use the machines. Not everyone is a conformist, even in Japan. In my view, the biggest factor inhibiting kids is the cost. When we were underage and looking for booze with fake IDs, we'd always try to find the cheapest (and thus worst) booze there was.
Theory on youth crime (Score:5, Interesting)
My father was stationed in Japan during the Korean war, and said theft by the locals was common back then. They'd swipe wires and metals from military equipment. The economic situation was tough for many, so they took risks to survive.
An interesting theory about the current low crime rate is that because the birth rate has been dropping, vandalism and violent crime has dropped because most of such crimes are done by youth. The decrease in youth also caused there to arguably be excess cops on the beat because there is less to do. Thus, there are more cops watching and chasing fewer youth. As a youth, your chance of getting caught goes up. It's a double factor at play.
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I don't understand your anger. My statement doesn't contradict that.
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Actually, I'm pretty sure that the machines now require ID cards to sell beer. Turns out that Japanese kids aren't that different from Americans.
I better note that I don't really know how it works or how easy it might be to beat that system, because I don't buy beer from vending machines. I can't even recall seeing any machines selling hard liquor, though many liquor stores have a cluster of machines in front of them, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them go beyond beer and sake.
I can say how it works
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Kids buying cigs? Yes:because it's South Carolina (Score:2)
I'll always remember being about 11, and I saw another kid about my age buy cigarettes from a vending machine when we were on vacation. I wasn't interested in trying them yet, definitely not a whole pack that's for sure. That scene always stuck with me. I'm not picking on SC. I'm sure that happened wherever there were cigarette vending machines... in the US. That's why you almost never see them any more. After a long time thinking they were totally gone, I saw one--in an Indian casino. People under 2
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I think you misunderstood the cop there. He probably knew that children were buying booze from vending machines and he was unable to stop them, but when asked directly about it didn't want to say that so gave a non-answer.
This is a very common misunderstanding between Japanese and foreign people. I can't even really explain it, except to say that he likely wanted to avoid having to admit his job was basically impossible, and that Japan has a lot of low level crime like that which is dealt with informally or
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That is an important factor, but it's still gone beyond the reasonable point. They are wasting LOTS of electricity and much of the price you pay is therefore paying for the waste.
In solution terms, I wish the vending machines were networked for lower density. Yeah, I can walk across the street and check the 4 machines I can see over there, but maybe I'll again discover that none of those machines has Dr Pepper. Much better if the machine I'm looking at could point me at the best machine in the right directi
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They're not a waste. You're focusing solely on the energy cost. Vending machines also exist because of space, time, and population constraints. The service a vending machine provides per square meter is greater than what you get with a convenience or grocery store. The service is a lot quicker than having to wait in line for a c
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I think you're arguing in favor of slave labor? The thing about vending machines is that they can survive on really small "salaries" based on ridiculously low profit margins. Main constraint is probably on the machines that are paid for with borrowed money, in which case they need to pay for the electricity and the interest, too.
You reminded me of a funny example I know of. On one side of a major grocery store there is a row of vending machines. Most of them are selling drinks, the same drinks you can buy f
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Vending machines provide emergency services too now. Many have an emergency mode that kicks in after severe earthquakes and the like. Free vend of drinks, a power supply for charging phones and other equipment, light in case the other lighting power goes out, that kind of thing. Some have cellular modems in them for reporting stock levels, and can switch on a wifi hotspot for people to get safety information and contact relatives.
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Wait, you think they use too much power, and suggest adding network connectivity and always on stock notifcations with WIFI?
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From the tone of your question, it sounds like you do not understand how much power a heat pump consumes in contrast to how little power a wireless network uses. Last time I checked the numbers it was about two orders of magnitudes, in which case a 1% reduction in unneeded vending machines would be a net savings of energy.
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And nobody vandalizes them, because it's Japan.
Having cultural consent on something like that is nice.
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Can we please stop linking to CNN until they've figured out how to make their videos NOT AUTOPLAY? Argh.
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CNN is rude news. Extremely rude, believe me! They play loser videos without even asking, as if they are the biggest fish on the planet, just barging in and bing bong, play play play. You are NOT the biggest fish, I am, and I'll squash you like a bug if you don't send those disastrous shithole videos back to where they came from! #MVGA!
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You're also feeding a troll, though it would be nice if the funny food had some kind of repellent effect. At this point I'm so fed up with the AC abuse of anonymity that I'm wishing Slashdot had an option to reduce the score of comments that are tainted by quoting ACs...
None of which has anything to do with Japan or vending machines, but diversion seems be the entire life purpose of the trolls.
Re:Because it's Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget iced coffee in cans. I like the actual coffee in cans, the ones with the chemical mix in the bottom that you can activate which heats the can so you end up with a nice warm beverage whenever you want.
Heated coffee in vending machines, cat girls, decent game shows, Japan is just one unicorn away from being an ideal fairy land.
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And nobody vandalizes them, because it's Japan.
Misaka MIkoto does. Of course that was after it had stolen 1,000 yen from her once. She learned how high kick it to get a free drink and that's where you learn what she wears underneath her miniskirt.
Also Shizuo Heiwajima. Technically he uses them as a weapon because he throws them at his opponents but I am sure the machine owners don't appreciate it.
So it isn't unknown.
Misaka Mikoto is an animie character (Score:2)
Ditto Shizou Heiwajima. This sounds like the discussion of video games causing mass shootings.
Having said that, it somehow got me to wondering why the pros leave them alone. Even in areas that are heavily marked as yakuza territory, you don't see vandalized machines, though often they do have more robust locks on the machines in such neighborhoods.
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Re: Because it's Japan (Score:2)
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For ages I used to drink Boss coffee every day. For some reason the boss in question is Tommy Lee Jones. His face is on every can.
Then I switched to Georgia, specifically the "Emerald Mountain Blend", cold. In the evenings I'd switch to Aquias diet water. In Japanese "water" means a flavoured health drink. Never a big of Calpis, it's basically like watered down sweet flavoured milk.
Best of all is that you can get bottled green tea in every vending machine. In the west it's either water or some kind of fruit
I like the ones selling used panties (Score:1)
I guess for old pervs to sniff.
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Yeah, that's exactly what I think of when I think of "lonely vending machines".
Don't think they exist (Score:2)
I've been to Japan a number of times and never seen them. We've asked (to get a picture of them) and been laughed at. There are a lot of strange things you can buy from vending machines but used panties don't seem to be the case.
Doing a quick search and this article validates what I've seen and not seen there: https://www.techinasia.com/jap... [techinasia.com]
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We've asked (to get a picture of them) and been laughed at.
Here's your picture: Burusera [wikipedia.org]
The German city I live in has a lot of Japanese tourists. A photographer friend of mine used to earn a few Euros on the side, by taking professional pictures of tourists up at the local castle.
I floated the idea that together we sell "Used German Schoolgirl Panties" to large groups of male Japanese tourists. It would be a very simple operation: buy the panties bulk at a flea market . . . spray them with some, um, "fragrance". Pay some German schoolgirls one Euro to take a p
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I've been to Japan a number of times and never seen them.
Sales from vending machines were banned in 2004.
But if you are into used schoolgirl panties, you can still buy them in shops.
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I think they were a joke on TV, a lot of "facts" about Japan are actually just jokes some journalist decided was a fact. The most infamous being the poodle/sheep mix up.
Look at it this way. If such a thing ever did exist (and it's not beyond the realm of possibility, there are adult vending machines selling sex toys in love hotels) you can be sure the panties were never worn by actual schoolgirls.
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You know that the entirety of Japan isn't Shinjuku City,Tokyo right?
There are more than enough places that are not "neon lights everywhere" in Japan.
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Still, most of those machines are around the capital i bet. The Greater Tokyo area alone accounts for 38 million people, and of course those vending machines are concentrated in the high density areas, so disproportionately in places such as that.
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Just don't ask why those vending machines aren't vandalized, you'll be called racists by the baizou.
By the looks of things, the reason they are not vandalized is because they are in the middle of nowhere in low traffic locations and usually out in the open. I don't think it's cultural... Something tells me it happens there too..
I went to Google Street View and it took me about 3 min to find a vandalized vending machine on the streets in Tokyo. You try it.
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I went to Google Street View and it took me about 3 min to find a vandalized vending machine on the streets in Tokyo.
I walked around Tokyo for three months and I can't remember ever seeing a vending machine that was vandalized. I remember one that was old and weather-worn.
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I went to Google Street View and it took me about 3 min to find a vandalized vending machine on the streets in Tokyo.
I walked around Tokyo for three months and I can't remember ever seeing a vending machine that was vandalized. I remember one that was old and weather-worn.
Well, There are places I'll go in street view that I wouldn't attempt on foot.
My point was that vandalism still exists in Japan, even if it's not as prevalent as in other countries. I figure it's pretty much a matter of human nature being what it is. Japan isn't a Utopia for vending machine operators. Looks to me like it's a popular business, with everybody and their brother servicing a small route as a night time gig over having a job as a janitor, driving a taxi or being a night watchman. There must
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My point was that vandalism still exists in Japan, even if it's not as prevalent as in other countries.
Do you have a link to the street view of a vandalized machine?
Well, There are places I'll go in street view that I wouldn't attempt on foot.
There is no part of Japan I wouldn't go on foot, though I admit I am more foolhardy than some.
Ah, coffee vending machines (Score:2)
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Convenience Stores (Score:2)
Do these just replace the Convenience Stores of america? I'd rather there be a Sheetz every 10 or 20 miles than a vending machine ever 1 mile.
Or Wawa, i suppose, if necessary.
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Not really. I'd say they complement each other. Convenience stores are very common in Japan. They are called "conbini" (from the English word) and often have a wide variety of ready-to-eat food of a more healthier variety (more vegetables) than in the West.
Here in Europe, my impression is that convenience stores tend to be more about candy, snacks and sodas, and when there is more filling food: that food is mostly microwave pizzas and hot dogs.
Replacing kiosks with vending machines? (Score:2)
Actually, they are replacing a lot of little stores with vending machines, especially for the kiosks in the train stations. Hard for human beings to compete with slave labor? That's really how I'm coming to see automation. Or maybe the question should be "Why would anyone try to compete with slave labor?"
I even think Japan is closer to needing UBI than America is. I'm actually rooting for the Asian guy, even though he doesn't have a prayer. It is a problem we need to start thinking seriously about.
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The same argument could be made calling *any* labor-saving device / software as "slave labor". Why use a spreadsheet when you're putting hundreds of accountants out of work who could have manually calculated those figures for you? The logical fallacy is obvious, the automation creates new use-cases.
Similarly, a vending machine doesn't put a guy out of work. Places without vending machines don't in fact have a 24 cold-drinks kiosk manned by a human. Additionally, Japan has an aging population so they need to
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Should read: *24-hour cold-drinks kiosk
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Not much to say there. I think you're mostly wrong, and quite possibly have never worked at a minimum wage job. Or should I go farther and predict you fantasize that you are so special and irreplaceable that you could never be replaced by a machine?
I'm not a Luddite, but things are changing quite rapidly now. The machines are moving into the specialized intellectual turf. If we don't understand what is happening and adjust the system so we still have a place in it, pretty soon we'll wake up on the outside..
Re:Convenience Stores (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nah. Drove through back country Japan for 5 hours due to tropical storm taking out the bullet train and the highways. Passed like thirty 7-11s no joke. Which are all by the way way better then Wawa or any American convenience store. There were vending machines everywhere too.
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If you can only gets snacks every 20 miles, you need to drive to get snacks. Japan isn't as big a car culture as the USA: they have good public transport. Japanese aren't going to scoot 20 miles to get a cold drink.
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Until this moment, I had never heard of either "Sheetz" or "Wawa".
Learn something new every day.
This is what we need here (Score:2)
This is what we need here too. Why donâ(TM)t Tesla charging stations or even gas stations have vending machines for example? They might have to be bulletproof though. And able to fight back.
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Re: This is what we need here (Score:2)
And who's going to have you fill out the form 4473 and then call NICS for your background check?
Ugg.... (Score:1)
When I see those photographs, I don't the the beauty of anything.
Just more garish trash, littering the countryside.
Ohh. Bright lights. Yea.
Irony of trash-cans (Score:1)
I was in Japan last year, and now that I think about it, there were a lot of vending machines.
However, the irony is that trash cans were hard to find. Easy to buy, hard to get rid of. My understanding is that it's customary to carry your trash with you until you get home or to a main bus/tram terminal.
Most follow the rules, making for a clean country. If you littered, even accidentally, you got dirty looks.
Sad victory of UBL? (Score:2)
The trash cans disappeared after 9/11. Actually, there were times they would hide the trash cans before that because they were regarded as a security risk on special occasions, but after 9/11 the state of alarm became pretty much continuous and most of the public trash cans vanished.
The convenience stores have them and most stations. I even know a public park that still has a few, but these days knowing how to find a trash can is almost a survival skill for Japan. Many of the convenience store trash cans ha
This one time, in Japan, I got really drunk ... (Score:1)
after a "team building" exercise with my coworkers and boss. These are mandatory to attend. Everyone gets really drunk and it is perfectly acceptable to tell your boss how much he sucks.
On my way home, while puking in some bushes, I crapped my pants, just a little. Found a vending machine with fresh pants, found a toilet (it was a nasty squat shitter as they sometimes have there) and changed after cleaning up as best I could.
Once left my wallet in one of those tiny nook shops in Japan. It was right next