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Posted by Mike Cash (Kiryu, Japan) on 29 June 2008 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.

Discarded baby strollers are very commonly used by Japan's homeless for carting their belongings around. Every once in a great while you can happen across a fellow like this one who has combined several into a train, with himself as locomotive.

It just occurred to me that I have never seen a homeless person in Japan using a shopping cart. There is a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with availability of the carts. On Japanese shopping carts all four wheels are on freely rotating casters. This is convenient in the narrow aisles of stores, because you can just give the cart a sideways shove and move it over. On the other hand, they don't track straight and are apt to wander off in any direction. If he tried to pull such carts in the same way he is doing here, they would constantly be swerving off in search of lower ground, thanks to our old friend gravity.

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