Slides

Playground Slides 

By Haruko Yanagita

Slides are a type of playground equipment often found in parks that you enjoy by climbing up to a high spot and then sliding down. Slides are not only used as playground equipment. They are also used as fire escape equipment, as they can be used to evacuate many people from a place with a height difference in a short period of time. In kindergartens with two or more floors, an emergency slide is available in addition to emergency stairs to swiftly evacuate children who cannot go down the stairs quickly.

In parks, we often see slides made of metal or concrete. Plastic slides are also available for indoor use. Large slides are often called suraidās, but some of them have rollers on the part you slide down or have some type of appurtenance on which you can ride down.

Slides with rollers for the sliding part are called rōrā suraidās. There is a roller slide in Nihondaira Zoo in Shizuoka Prefecture that has a total length of 390 meters, and one in Kinoko no Mori in Fukui Prefecture with a total length of 460 meters. Mats and other items to sit on are used on long slides to prevent your rear from becoming sore.

As for slides that feature an appurtenance, there is a slide in Okuhitachi Kirara no Sato (Twinkle Heart Twinkle World) in Ibaraki Prefecture that is the longest in Japan with a slide distance of 877 meters, and a slide in the Principality of Andorra in Europe with a total length of 5 km. In this type of slide, you sit on a bobsled-type sleigh, and slide down a half-pipe-shaped stainless steel runway along a mountain slope. It differs from a roller slide in that your rear does not become sore, but a brake system is put in place because it picks up too much speed on the way down.

There are also slides in swimming pools. In these so-called water slides, you climb stairs up to a starting platform and slide down a slide with flowing water towards a pool. There are many different types of water slides, such as types that are similar to regular slides, types that are tubes through which you slide down, and types on which you ride a rubber boat to slide down. The world’s longest slide made of a tube through which you slide down is one in Germany with a total length of 356 meters.