Kawaii Barricades for Construction Seen on the Road

During road construction, barricades are placed to clearly indicate to pedestrians and cars that they are not allowed in. In the past, ordinary barricades were used in Japan, but nowadays these barricades are often designed with animals or characters.

Why was a pretty barricade made?

The company making the different barricade is “Sendai Meiban”, a company that rents out security equipment for construction. When this company was offered a job by the city of Asahikawa in Hokkaido in 2006, they made a barricade with a monkey motif to give tourists the impression of Asahikawa’s famous Asahikawa Zoo, rather than the impression that they were doing construction work.

The variety is increasing

The monkey barricade became so popular that other animals such as frogs were made. From that point on, they began to incorporate famous local objects into their designs to make them more familiar. For example, Shisa in Okinawa Prefecture and Sky Tree in Tokyo. In Japan, each prefecture or region has its own official character, so barricades of these characters are created and used in different places.

Efforts to make a cute barricade

Barricades have a stick in the middle. Therefore, when making a character barricade, we have to get permission to make a hole in the middle of the design. Since they are tools for construction safety, we cannot lose safety by changing the position of the bar. Therefore, they would like to increase the number of types of characters, but it is difficult to make all of them because they may not get permission to change the design.In addition, since they are also used for construction work at night, some parts of the characters are reflective or have uneven surfaces to increase their strength, in an effort to protect the safety of construction work.