There are two designs in old Kyoto that don't mix well: the wooden walls of the traditional buildings and dog urine.
Apart from its smell, the pee seeps into the wood and accelerates rotting. Needless to say, replacing one wall of your home is both troublesome and expensive, which is why home owners have come up with ways to discourage dogs and their owners, with one drawing on divine intervention and the other a more physical deterrent.
Would you let your dog urinate against a temple? Neither would the Japanese it seems, which is why many wooden houses have miniature Shinto shrine gates propped up against their walls. Yet not all dogs have owners, religiously tolerant or otherwise, which explains why some households have opted for a curved bamboo fence. The fence makes it difficult for dogs to raise a leg against the wall, thus discouraging the practice and hopefully moving the problem on to a distant lamp post.
With space a premium in the city, gardens are few but it is a different story in the countryside. So what are those plastic bottles of water doing in the vegetable patch? While a plastic bottle gleaming in the sunshine might not add to a garden's aesthetic appearance, it apparently persuades dogs and cats to go elsewhere.