Japanese manholes

Talking about manholes (see previous post), there was a nice link list to Japanese manhole pictures on backspace.com back in October 2002. Some of the links are dead or forgotten, but マンホールのふた and マンホール Best! are worth a look.

There are also a LOT of Japanese manhole pictures on Flickr. A simple search returns more than 150 results, and the "manhole cover" group's Japan section is even completely devoted to the subject - this one's my favorite!

Update: there's a great manhole design gallery over at frangipani.