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Image: Nikon

Nikon started operating out of its new headquarters in Tokyo earlier this year, and a few recent posts have shown a few fun Easter eggs hidden around the campus.

Last week, Reddit user tomyan112 posted an image of a manhole cover designed to look like a Nikon lens cap to the site’s “Design Porn” board. While it’s not the most intricately designed cover in Japan, it does definitely look the part of Nikon’s Z-mount lens caps.

I can almost feel that pattern through the screen. Image: Katsura Iwamoto

Obviously, Reddit posts should be taken with a massive grain of salt, especially in the age of cheap and easy AI generation, but the image appears to be genuine. Before it made it to Reddit, it was posted on X (formerly Twitter), where it was retweeted by Nikon’s president and COO, Muneaki Tokunari. There’s also another angle of the cover posted by Katsura Iwamoto, a software engineer at Nikon.

Tokunari and Iwamoto have also posted about the floors at the new building. According to Google’s translation of an article by the Mynavi news site, the tiles contained bits of crushed glass sourced from lenses that didn’t meet quality standards. A translated post from Iwamoto says the chunks are “extremely transparent.”

What lens was this glass once destined for before becoming building material? Image: Katsura Iwamoto

The headquarters covers 18,000m² (almost 4.5 acres), so it seems likely there’ll be more design nods to photography uncovered and posted to the internet, especially once the Nikon Museum there reopens to the public. But even if these two examples are all we ever see, it’s nice to know that there was care and effort put into making sure the building’s construction reflects what the engineers there are building. And PS: if you work for another camera manufacturer and there are similar touches around your campus, definitely get in touch to let us know about it.

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