This is garbage

Throwing away trash in Japan is a major pain in the ass. Because a population roughly half the size of the U.S. is crammed onto an island the size of California, there isn’t a lot of room for waste. They take trash collection very seriously.

Pinned up on my fridge is a giant poster explaining how to throw out my trash.

Burnable garbage (food, paper, various plastics, fabrics, wood, etc.) must be placed in special city-designated bags purchasable at the grocery store and are picked up MWF. Non-burnable garbage (small appliances, dishes, small electronic equipment, makeup containers, etc.) is picked up the 2nd Tuesday of each month in designated bags. Aluminum cans, metal appliances or electronic goods, bottle glass, batteries, and PET plastic (drink) bottles can be placed in any bag and are picked up ONLY the last Thursday of each month. (!!) Cardboard must be flattened and is picked up the 2nd Thursday of each month. “Large garbage” (futons, furniture, bikes, computers, etc.) must be scheduled by appointment for pickup on the 2nd and 4th Friday. Hazardous items (needles, gas cans) must be dealt with at a specialty store and may not be thrown away. Household items should be recycled at local shops when possible.

*Phew*

The fact that I can only throw out my bottles, cans, or glass one day a month is somehow due to the fact that I live in the country; for example in Tokyo these items are collected every week on the 2 days opposite to burnable trash collection.

This is the shrine two blocks from my house where I must leave this special bottles-and-cans offering on the last Thursday of every month at 7 a.m.

Suffice to say, I currently have an outside storage closet containing my bicycle and 12 months worth of bottles, cans, and glass. In fact the trek to take this photo was the first time I’ve been to that shrine since its location was first explained to me. Take that God of Trash.

If you don’t throw out your trash properly, they have ways of making you do it aside from just refusing to pick it up, causing the neighborhood to try to determine whose garbage has been left there for days on end and then reprimanding the offender (peer pressure works amazingly well here).

One time on a sensational news program they talked about how foreigners don’t throw out their trash properly. They found some poor Chinese couple who had thrown out some nonburnable items into a burnable bag and hunted them down on camera, brought them to the trash and proceeded to open the bag, showing them how wrong they were, complete with faces censored, camera zooms on the bag, and menacing music. Damn those foreigners.

Of course it doesn’t help that these instructions which are barely decipherable by the country’s own citizens, are usually only available written in Japanese. Of course I can read these instructions because I can read Japanese.

Garbage instructions are written in Japanese with no English, but then sometimes you’ll see random hilarious signs written only in English with no Japanese, like “No dancing”, “Please pick up after yourself” or “Please don’t try on earrings.” Tourists in Japan do some interesting things, let me tell you. Some may even be teaching English…