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Compellingly creepy collection of retro mailboxes stands in rural Japanese town【Photos】

Casey Baseel May 28, 2021
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Sort of nostalgic, sort of scary, and very, very bizarre.

Saitama Prefecture’s Ogose seems like the quintessential nondescript small town, too rural to be exciting yet also too developed to be ideally bucolic picturesque. But sometimes it’s the most ordinary-seeming places that hide the oddest surprises, and Japanese Twitter user @enuenuenubi found an extremely weird one on a recent visit.

Next to a rustic wooden house in Ogose is a row of decommissioned mailboxes.

Each and every one of them is the old-school red pillar design, a type of mailbox that’s becoming less and less common in Japan. Leaving old mail boxes outside your home, however, isn’t an established landscaping motif in Japan, like, say, setting out old stone lanterns. There’s no sign explaining the mailboxes’ presence, either. They’re just…there…seemingly hungering for your soul to fill the empty space inside them where people used to drop their letters and postcards.

Oh, and there’s also a gigantic triceratops statue, because why not?

No fewer than 16 mailboxes are lined up, and the somewhat unnerving nostalgia on display has prompted comments such as:

“This would be so creepy if you stumbled on it in the middle of the night.”
“You can almost hear them moaning out of their mail-slot mouths.”
“I bet you one of them comes alive at night and walks around the town.”
“Youkai mail boxes!”

役目を終えたポストたちが集まる不思議な場所がありました。これだけ沢山並んでるんだし、ひとつくらいはここじゃないどこかに手紙を届けてくれたならばステキなお話だ。（トリケラトプスよ何故お前もいる） pic.twitter.com/SGdhbEl9Hf

— えぬびい (@enuenuenubi) May 20, 2021

It turns out that the plot of land is owned by Kannabe Doken, a local construction firm that apparently owns a few other properties in the town with their own individual brands of weirdness, such as the building with a rusted-out car on its roof…

…the courtyard with statues of Buzz Lightyear, Santa Claus, giant Peter Rabbit, the bikini girl from the Umi Monogatari pachinko series, and anime robots Tetsujin 28 and Mazinger Z (the latter stationed at the top of a lookout tower)…

…and, naturally, what looks to be a separate collection of mailboxes at another site.

As for why Kannabe Doken is collecting old mailboxes, an employee for the firm simply says “Our company president likes this sort of thing,” and it makes a certain sort of twisted logic. After all, if a man’s home is his castle, then surely the surrounding property can be his kingdom of weirdness.

Source: Twitter/@enuenuenubi, IT Media
Images: Twitter/@enuenuenubi
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