Originally Posted by Steve M

As an aside, when I was in Shanghai recently, I saw umbrella repair people along the sidewalk in several places, each with a little specialized machine for this purpose. It made me wonder: if a basic umbrella is 500 yen in Japan, they've got to be even cheaper in China. That being the case, what is the case for having them repaired? After looking a bit, the Chinese version of the 500 yen umbrella costs about US$1.50. Even at that price, people get them repaired when they break rather than consider them a throw-away item. Amazing.