Cute Japan

Have you ever seen a 9cm casserole dish? Even when I lived on my own I never had a hankering after one this small. 

Japan seems to specialise in small and cute. It isn't really a surprise to find such a small piece of kitchen equipment. I can easily buy many kinds of tiny things, from cake tins to coffee filters to bowls and strainers (see some here). A few elements within Japan feeds into this, including:

• tiny kitchens—hence no room to store large things
• a limited baking tradition—many people have no oven
• a high percentage of one and two person households
• Single-adult households in Tokyo were 45.8 percent, while in Osaka, they were 35.8 percent in the 2010 census. (Japan Times, 19 April, 2014))
• bonsai tradition

But this website is pushing the small a little to the extreme.

P.S. I'm still recovering from the five-day Thrift Shop marathon. Probably tomorrow I'll be able to come up with something more of a blog-post. (I'm snapping photos to show you some of the bargains we found at the giant school garage sale.)