Wow, here in the north-west sprawl of Tokyo, when they say public toilet, they really mean it!

A glance up at a nearby sign reveals that this is actually a shop window display for a shop selling toilets made by TOTO – manufacturer of the world’s largest toilets!

Or maybe that should be the world’s largest toilet manufacturer?

Either way, I ended up reading this thrilling Wikipedia article about toilets in Japan. Nobody ever said Wikipedia wasn’t informative!

Thanks to Andy for the submission and Simon for the research…

As more and more street-level imagery keeps getting added, it’s time for another Friday Street View Roundup – and today’s theme is “Crime on Street View”!

8) Indecent Exposure

This woman’s dignity has been saved by a bit of face-blurring! Of course her nipples are exposed for all the world to see. Fail!

7) Antisocial Behaviour

These pesky kids are setting up a trip-wire between two bollards. The youth of today, eh? If only the Street View camera had captured the moment they tripped a passer-by…

6) Blocking the road

Five of Providence’s Police Force have blocked up this road for a bit of a pow-wow. How inconsiderate! Someone should give them a ticket.

5) Having a camera on the roof of your car

The French authorities obviously deemed the large camera on top of the car to be a suspicious device, and pulled the Google driver over for an investigation.

Move south down Rue de la Garde and you’ll experience a thrilling chase scene!

4) Grand Theft Auto

It’s one thing to steal a car, but propping that car up on six-foot stilts in your garden is probably unwise.

3) Grafitti

This the the work of Invader, whose Space Invader themed artworks can be spotted all over Paris. He’s even branched out into Oscar the Grouch artworks¹.

2) Taking Hostages?

Of course this could be any crime really, but if it requires an armed policeman hiding behind a car, you can expect whoever’s inside did more than steal some sweeties.

1) Alien Invasion

Presumably there can be no greater crime than invading our planet in little red UFOs?

All these Street View sightings were previously posted to our Twitter account – make sure you follow us for instant updates!

Here at Google Sightseeing we love to explore abandoned, off-limits places, much as the rest of the Internet does – from a safe distance. In the past we’ve featured abandoned towns, cities, mines and even whole abandoned islands, but we’ve never yet featured an abandoned experimental pond.

While not normally the subject of much experimentation (after all, ponds are already very good at being ponds), this particular pond was built in the early 1960s by the Nippon Steel Corporation as part of an investigation into the osmotic pressure produced between fresh and sea water.

As it turned out, the sea water was deemed “too salty”, and just like that, Nippon Steel gave up on the whole idea.

Today the pond, known as ‘Shintou Jikken Ike’, is instead the cosy home to a colony of happy cormorants – which just goes to show you that sometimes a pond is just a pond.

Here’s some ground level photos of the pond as discovered by a wandering Japanese photographer.

Thanks to Hide.

This bizarre tower is the Perfect Liberty Peace Tower in Tondabayashi, Japan, and from up here it looks like it might be constructed entirely from cotton-wool.

Completed in 1970 this incredibly oddly-shaped tower stands at 180 m, and was actually made by spraying concrete at a wire mesh. The irregular shape looks like a disaster waiting to happen, but is actually designed to be earthquake resistant thanks to its centre of gravity being set just 12 m above ground level.

The Peace Tower is part of the headquarters of Perfect Liberty, a “modern” religion whose motto is “Life is Art”. Anyone can visit the tower, but apparently it’s inadvisable as you will be approached to be “drawn into the religion“. Perhaps for this reason, the Street View car kept its distance – the closest shot is from a passing motorway.

However, a local photographer has dared to venture up close, and has loads of pictures showing just how truly weird the tower is.

Thanks to adrbr.

On this day, August 6, in 1945 – the first nuclear weapon to be used in war was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb, Little Boy, was released at 8:15 local time by the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, and the resulting explosion completely destroyed around 69% of the city’s buildings, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people.

By the end of the year as many as 140,000 of Hiroshima’s people were dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Since then thousands more have died from injuries or illness attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bomb.

The bomb was aimed at this t-shaped bridge, and on the river bank here is the closest structure to ground zero which survived. Today it is known as the Atomic Bomb Dome, remaining exactly as it did in the aftermath of the bomb, and serving as a stark reminder of the devastation nuclear weapons can cause.

The Atomic Bomb Dome is part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park which is mainly situated on the island to the south. There are a variety of monuments and buildings in the park, each dedicated to a different aspect of the bombing, all of which are laid out along the course the Enola Gay took, exactly 63 years ago today.

Three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, the US dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki, where a further 80,000 people would be dead by the end of the year.

Educate yourself further about these tragedies by exploring the Wikipedia pages on the subject, beginning with the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thanks to Alexey Panasenko, Matt Van Pelt, nineo, Mikhail, Jack, eRez and Matthew McMillan.