The Three R's

This one is for environmentally-/waste-minded friends like Amy and Lindsay. Before I ever made it here, they were warning me that Japan is notorious for the large number of garbage incinerators that they have in use. When you look at the place and see how remarkably uncommon flat, useful land is in this archipelago nation perched on the shoulders of volcanoes, and you think about how any flat, useful land there is was probably first settled several hundred (if not a thousand) years ago, it’s clear why these people can’t rely on landfills to dispose of their waste, as we do in land-rich North America.

Still you’d hope that, with all the people here, and all the futuristic technology for making various parts of their lives more efficient, the Japanese may have developed some kind of space-aged composting technology to capitalize on the vast amounts of organic waste they do create.

And when I first arrived here, the outlook seemed like a good one. I had been warned about the very anal-retentive approach the Japanese take to sorting their garbage, and that was completely on the mark. There were three different, colour-coded garbage bags to be used when sorting your garbage, and recycling was divided between different bins for cans, plastics, glass, and coloured glass.

Certainly a nation that was so scrupulous with sorting their trash would be just as scrupulous about disposing of it. Maybe Lindsay and Amy were wrong; maybe the Japanese had turned over a new leaf and mothballed all of those big black incinertators. As I tried to make sense of the document detailing how the garbage system worked (which, thankfully, had more pictures on it than words), I was happy to see that the very eco-looking green bag was the one that we were supposed to put all the biodegradables like paper, food waste, and tea bags into. Surely this thing was heading straight for the local composting depot.

Then I received a presentation from the town official in charge of waste management. He didn’t speak much English, but he used the little English he did have to burst my bubble about an eco-friendly Japan. He pointed to the green bag and all the lovely compostables in it and uttered one syllable:

“Fire.”

He pointed to the orange bag, where we were supposed to deposit all of the plastic and foil wrap (there’s so much of this crap on Japanese food that I’m pretty sure their packaged food would ride out a nuclear holocaust just fine. They put bunches of bananas in plastic bags. They saranwrap nets of oranges. They shrinkwrap tomatoes to Styrofoam forms.) and said:

“No fire.”

He pointed to the yellow bag, which we were supposed to use for broken glass, dead appliances, used batteries, and any other household detritus too substantial for the other two bags. He raised his arms in a shrug, gave me his surprised face, and said

“Uhh-Ooh!”

I assumed he meant “broken” by that.

And just like that, my dreams of an eco-Japan went up in smoke. All those lovely compostables were also the most burnable items of Japanese refuse. Not only that, but as I’ve asked around about what they do with the plastic and foil/orange-bag items, the kind of veiled, non-answers I’ve gotten have lead me to wonder if they’re not hucking these on the bonfire as well—just in some other, more specialized incinerators.

I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have a separate garbage bag for silica packages. It seems that every packaged food item I pick up from the kombini not only has several dozen yards of plastic wrap in successive layers to hermetically seal it off from the outside world, but it also has a silica package in it, sporting some awesome Engrish brand name like “Everflesh” or “Infinisoftu.” I’ve honestly bought the most insignificant of donuts from the kombini and had the thing sitting on its own plastic tray, with a silica package beneath it, and a layer of plastic wrap around it. When I take it to the cash, they’ll put it in the world’s only individual-donut plastic bag, and they'll try to hand me some disposable hashi to eat it with. If I succeed in waving all that off, they’ll still slap a plastic sticker on the plastic packaging of my individual donut incase someone mistakenly tries to bust me for shoplifting in the four feet between the cash and the door.

And once you get all of that annoying plastic packaging out of the kombini, and you head off to your eventual destination, merrily eating your donut along the way, you face another harsh reality of the Japanese waste management system:

Waste management is your problem.

Public garbage cans are so rare in this place as to be mythical. You can only really find garbage cans outside kombinis, and even then not all kombinis have them. While Mark, Lindsay, and I are out and about, we’ll always keep an eye out for a garbage. When one of us spots one, it is that person’s duty to announce it to the rest of the crew so everyone can empty their pockets of all the plastic wrap and silica packages they’ve accumulated. Hell, with the amenities provided by all of the kombinis, it tends to be easier to find a clean public toilet than it is to find a trash can. It’s another one of the little paradoxes of Japanese society: they create more waste than anywhere else on the planet, but they don’t make it easy get rid of it.

Back in September at my town’s big festival, when they’d ringed a town shrine with food vending (and plastic dispensing) stalls, I approached aforementioned Town Waste Guy and asked him where the garbage bins were. He laughed and engrished “you take it to MY house.” Despite the possible comedic misinterpretation waiting in that sentence, I understood that what he meant was “Your” house, in the same way that the Japanese will call your personal chopsticks “MY hashi.” The town had set up this little waste generation station, but they’d be damned if they were going to help me dispose of the ridiculously hot fishdog-on-a-stick that my sneaky JR High students had bought me as a joke.

Then again, though the Japanese may not yet have “Reduce” down pat, they are certainly rocking “Reuse.” The Japanese have put second-hand shops to work like I’ve never seen before. Recycle Shops, from "2nd Street" to the hilariously named "Hard-Off," are everywhere, and since the Japanese like having new, shiny stuff, you will often be able to find their almost-new, just-less-than-shiny stuff for a bargain at these stores. I’ve caught some stores making a real buck off it—like the 2nd Street clothing shop in Sapporo that marks second-hand stuff up to retro-chique prices—but, for the most part, these stores seem to be on the level and they offer used goods at a considerably higher quality level than you’d find at Goodwill.

The Sisters Co would think they’d died and gone to heaven.