Perhaps one of the most visible jobs one could have in Japan is the person who works at a construction site, waving traffic along with a flag or a flashlight cone. I’m not talking about the kind where they direct traffic, but rather the kind which simply stand in front of the traffic cones and work crews and gesture traffic to the other lane. That particular job tends to stand out for two reasons: first, you almost automatically imagine how easy and yet mind-numbingly boring and unrewarding such a job must be, and second, because 95% of the time, the position seems utterly unnecessary.

Now, there are some situations in which a person standing there controlling traffic is vital–like when the road construction is right around a sharp bend in the street, and you wouldn’t see it until it were too late. But most of the time, you can see the construction cones and heavy machinery from a mile away, and the person standing there waving you to avoid hitting them seems completely lame. But you gotta figure there’s a law that requires it.

Fairly often, you’ll encounter a site which is using a mechanical signaler–usually a simple stylized-figure cutout with a mechanical waving arm with a light on the end of it, as in the photo below. Nothing to write home about.

But once in a rare while you’ll see a rather interesting sight: a mechanical dummy, complete with arms that goes up and down, with a flag in hand. Talk about having your job taken over by a machine… but when your job is so completely simple and mechanical in the first place, one should pretty much expect to have a simple motor take over the position.

Click for larger image

The funny thing about this particular dummy was that the flag he’s waving had to be strapped onto the end of his arm–apparently, it’s not set up to hold one normally.

Nor are these mannequins unique to construction sites. One sometimes sees fake policemen as well. Back in my touring days, when I drove across Japan on a motorcycle, I would see both cutout photographs of policemen and mannequins dressed up as cops placed in strategic locations on roads to try to fool drivers into slowing down. Sometimes they were very realistic, but sometimes they were laughable, including one mannequin who was clearly strapped to a pole–it looked like he was both frozen absolutely rigid and tied up by a kidnapper or something.