Wired Japan

No, that's not a typo. This is a typical Japanese street:

seen out of one of the windows at my mother-in-law's home in Tokyo. The photo was taken at maximum zoom, creating a foreshortening effect, and there's actually about 50 metres of street between the apex of the roof in the foreground and the billboards at the junction.

(The partially obscured face on the advertising billboard, if you can't tell, is Richard Gere, who was doing a stint in Japan modelling for world-famous fashion male beauty clinic chain Dandy House.)

Here's a utility pole on the opposite side of the street:

The poles are situated down the opposite side of the street and have cables branching off to each building on the other side. They carry electricity and telephone cables, and seem to require a lot of maintenance. On narrower residential streets without pavements (of which Tokyo has many), the poles are generally placed on one of the narrow strips on either side of the street which are reserved for pedestrians, which means you have to keep stepping out into the "roadway" to avoid them. Fortunately there isn't usually much traffic and pedestrians have priority.

In the short run I presume they're cheaper to put up than digging underground conduits, yet given their propensity to fall over during serious earthquakes, surely Japan would be better off without them... In a few areas, efforts have been made to put these kind of cables underground, but most of Japan lives under a wired sky. After a while they just blend in with the scenery.