Lonesome Work

Posted by Mike Cash (Kiryu, Japan) on 11 April 2007 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.

A young lady working for a condominium developer mans a street corner sign directing prospective condo buyers to the site of the building. This particular lady was performing her lonely task in Yokohama.

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Comments (4)

Art Monkey from Salt Spring Island, Canada

your observations are astounding! - you always find such interesting things in the everyday!

11 Apr 2007 7:46am

@Art Monkey: Thank you very much. I have always taken delight in finding something interesting in the mundane.

Daroru from Osaka, Japan

Real sense of bleakness and loneliness Mike! The in-your-face quality of the gasoline sign draws your attention and stresses the irrelevance of the girl and her job, already suggested by her hanging head... Feel quite sad looking at your shot!

11 Apr 2007 3:19pm

NFV from Québec, Canada

beautiful.

12 Apr 2007 3:36am

Alex from Jeju, South Korea

One thing I've noticed from living in Japan - There are so many jobs that don't actually need a breathing human to do them, like holding signs, or having 3 men with red light sticks directing people around construction on a sidewalk when arrows would suffice.

I wonder if it's not all part of an effort to lower the unemployment level.

13 Apr 2007 1:24am

@Alex: Then again, there are times when they are not there and one notices that their absence makes a more noticeable difference than their presence does. We tend to think things would go well even without them, until we see things bolloxed up and saying, "Where the hell are those guys?".

But, as you say, very often it looks like nothing more than a make-work project. I suspect government regulation. Certainly no contractor is going to go out of his way to hire guys to direct traffic on his own nickel unless somebody is forcing him to do so.

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