Japan is an immaculately clean country. It’s one of the first things a westerner will notice about Japan. There’s hardly even any gum or cigarette butts on the ground, as culture mandates one takes care of ALL of their own garbage. (Mini-portable containers for cigarette butts are common for the most diligent smokers.) Unfortunately, there are no garbage cans on street corners for pedestrians to easily dispose of their soda bottle or other trash, so people must carry their garbage home or bring it to a convenience store to use their trash cans. It can be quite a nuisance.

Sorting trash is one of the biggest pains in the ass of living in Japan. First of all you have to buy color-coded, official-government, plastic garbage bags at the supermarket, as all other bags are not accepted. When I lived in Sada Town I had many different garbage bags of all different colors only to be left out ONLY at certain days of the month, according to some cryptic schedule. There were separate bags for plastic, paper and food, bottles, cans, glass, non-recyclables, and batteries. Newspapers had to be bundled and left out separately. If you wanted to throw away a toaster or something, you would have to call the sanitation department for a special pick-up, or bring it to a “recycling center” center yourself and pay to have it disposed of.

In Sada I was required to write my name and address on each bag so I could be identified with my trash. There was even an old man who acted as the garbage police and inspected all the garbage bags left in the collection bin. On several occassions garbage bags which I had thrown out were returned to my doorstep, because upon inspection they contained some item that was unacceptable for that particular bag. For example, if I left a piece of cardboard in the plastics bag, or a bottle cap in the plastic bottles bag. And if, God-forbid, I did not remove and separately sort the label from a plastic bottle I think that was grounds for deportation.

Thankfully, Tojo Town, was less strict, with less garbage bags colors and more flexible pick-up dates. And Mizunami City is even more lenient with only two different colored bags, burnable and non-burnable. I can even put plastics in with food and paper-type stuff because for some reason plastic is considered burnable here. However, I am still not sure what to do with tin cans and plastic bottles as there does not seem to be a bag for them. I think I may have to deliver them by hand to a collection center somewhere.

There’s no use of typical garbage cans in Japan. Usually there is a communal steel-mesh shed to put garbage bags in to await collection. However, my residence in Mizunami has no such luxury. I’m just supposed to leave the bags on the curb. When Mizunami kindly changed the color of acceptable bags on me last month, the garbageman refused to pick up my out-of-date turquoise bag and left my rejected bag sitting there on the curb.  Giant black crows then ripped the bag open and spread my trash all across the pavement.

I guess those crows were really RAVENous. *sigh*

The Japanese word of the day: GOMI – garbage