Tales from Japan part 5: The Best Thing in Japan

The Best Thing in Japan is not the insects, or watching girls ride bicycles, or even the Tokyo doll brothel. The best thing in Japan, and I kid you not, is this wooden slide Takako had when she was a kid, It's in her parents house now, and Ken uses it. Painted all over the slide part are these beautiful clean-line pictures of cartoon children playing with cartoon animals (a girl is on a swing clutching a book labeled "book"; a boy plays in the sand with a dog who holds a shovel, while a panda pushes a toy train past them), and there are faded angel-kids stickers stuck to it that have clearly been there since 1979. All this is good, or actually very good, but what makes the slide the Best Thing in Japan is the ladder going up the slide, or rather the color of the rungs. There are four: blue, red, cream, and green (ascending). The cream color is fine, but the blue, red, and green are of a vibrancy I have not seen in years, maybe since the late seventies, when everything was so ugly that a beautiful color had a chance to really stand out. I swear, these shades of blue, red, and green simply do not get made any more, and seeing them was like hearing a commercial jingle you haven't heard since childhood. If I could show these colors to someone old enough to remember, he would certainly say, wistfully, "Ah, yes, as I recall there used to be such colors in the world...what did become of them?" I don't know if we just lost the technology to make such colors, the way we lost the ability to make batik in 1981, or if people just stopped caring enough about things like colors so they no longer bother to make them so beautiful, or if, I don't know, some conspiracy with Murky Dismal or what. Anyway, the Best Thing about Japan is 3/4 of the ladder on this slide.

I would take a picture or something, but the colors would only be corrupted by your monitor settings.