With the rainy season here, this umbrella companion is a Daiso-premium bargain.
Having flipped the calendar to June, we’re clearly not in spring anymore, but many Japanese people would argue that we haven’t really made it to summer just yet. That’s because we’re at the start of tsuyu, or “the rainy season,” a roughly month-long stretch of wet weather that precedes the idyllic fun-in-the-sun section of summer.
As a matter of fact, Tokyo is getting drenched with heavy rains at the time of this writing, which is why we’re happy that we recently hit up Daiso and picked up an extremely handy item that we’re going to be putting to good use in the weeks to come.
This is actually one of Daiso’s premium-priced products, costing double what the chain usually charges for its items. Of course, with Daiso being Japan’s most famous 100 yen shop, that means that the Telescopic Umbrella Cover is still only 200 yen (US$1.30), and for how useful it is, that price feels like a bargain.
Even with Japan’s excellent train/subway network, life here tends to involve a lot of walking, since you’re at least going to need to get to/from the station. But while an umbrella will keep the rain off you while you’re outside, once you head inside or onto a train, you’ve now got a sopping shaft of damp fabric that’s going to wet your clothes, or the clothes of anyone standing close to you on one of Japan’s famously crowded trains.
Daiso’s Telescopic Umbrella Cover is here to solve that problem. Essentially a plastic cup with an accordion-like construction, it’s conveniently compact when scrunched down to its smallest size, but expands to accommodate umbrellas.
Simply insert your umbrella into the cover and push until it reaches your desired length.
Daiso’s case has a number of advantages compared to the disposable thin plastic bag-style slip-on covers provided at some shopping centers and stores in Japan. For one, there’s no trash generated with Daiso’s reusable cover, and unlike the disposable versions, the Daiso cover works not only with long umbrellas with pointy tips, but shorter folding umbrellas, the kind most popular with travelers, too.
Also, when you take your umbrella back out from a plastic-bag cover, you’re left with a bag of water from all the drops that dripped off the fabric. Daiso’s cover instead has a removable cap at the tip so that you can pour out the water in an appropriate place.
And while some umbrellas come with cloth covers to be slipped over them when wet but not in use, you then end up with a soggy fabric cover that’ll need to be washed once you get home, and repeated washings can damage its moisture absorbency. On the other hand, since Daiso’s case is made of plastic, you can simply wipe off the interior surfaces and it’ll be ready to go again.
Really, the only drawback we could see is that the case didn’t completely cover an extra-large 70-centimeter (27.6-inch) long umbrella that we included in our testing, but even then, it provided a long area length of protection.
Daiso’s Telescopic Umbrella Cover even has a chain so that you can clip it to your bag for easier carrying, and with sudden showers being something that can happen even after the “rainy season” is done, we might have one of these with us all summer long.
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