All About Factories and Other Cool Things

You never know what will become the next interesting mini-boom in a place like Japan. Over the past few years, many Japanese have decided that the coolest thing is…factories? Amazingly, the strange industrial beauty of factories and other dark places like electric power plants does have a certain charm, and there have been a string of popular photobooks dedicated to capturing these eerie places. There’s a variety show on TV that features objects being made in factories while famous TV personalities try to guess what’s being manufactured, writing their answers on digital screens that are later revealed so the audience can laugh at all the wrong answers. It’s quite fascinating to watch nylon fibers being spun and coated in plastic that turns out to be a fire house, or watch as long rods of steel are fed into a machine which clips pieces off and stamps them into pachinko balls. I was also fascinated to see how Mitsubishi makes pencils — I couldn’t take my eyes off the bizarre stream of wood as it was shaped and wrapped around the graphite leads.