One of the things most tourists in Japan have a problem with is the lack of public trash bins, which forces us to hold on to pieces of waste until we can find a trash can, which is usually either back in the hotel, or at convenience stores (konbini).
There are two primary reasons for that inconvenience. The first is a terrorist attack on March 20, 1995, where the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult led a series of coordinated chemical weapon attacks on the Tokyo subway system which left 12 people dead and more than 1,000 injured by exposure to the toxic agent. The lack of trash bins is a security measure that gives terrorists one less place to plant bombs in public spaces.
The second reason for the lack of trash bins would be the rules of their super complicated solid waste management system where all the rubbish has to be properly organized into the correct category before collection. A trash bin that is filled with unsorted rubbish is a problem they could avoid by applying the ‘easy’ solution of having no such problems in public spaces.
If littering is not an option, the only opportunity for trash disposal in Japan would be to bring your trash back to your hotel, where foreigners and tourists are essentially exempted from the rubbish sorting rules. If not the hotel, or a rare public trash bin, another place to find trash bins would be the konbini. However, do take note that segregation is still encouraged in the konbinis, so if you want to be a good tourist, do try to put your rubbish in the right bin.
There was one time I was walking around with a snack wrapper in my hand and was glad to find a trash bin beside a row of vending machines. Relieved, I stuck my trash into a perfectly hand sized circular hole and felt quite proud of myself for resisting the temptation to litter and then making the effort to find a trash bin. Sometime later, I saw a local dude putting PET bottles into the same type of trash bin and it dawned upon me that the hole was circular not for my hand, but for the bottles. It turns out that even if I tried, I still hadn’t disposed of my rubbish properly.
For Filipinos who don’t even have to think twice when it comes to trash disposal, because we live in a country where we are so undisciplined that not littering is already considered an achievement, discovering that certain types of trash have to go into certain bins can be mind boggling and too much work. It is probably also the reason why our landfills are not being utilized properly and our trash problem remains a big one.
The most basic trash rule segregation rule in Japan would involve figuring out if your trash is combustible or recyclable. Basically, food wrappers are combustibles, and bottles and cans are recyclable, so they shouldn’t be mixed in 1 bin/bag because that complicates the job of the trash collectors.
In Hiroshima, where my eldest has been living for his university degree for a couple of years already, he says the trash collectors simply won’t pick up trash that is not segregated properly. That happens because they use clear trash bags so the collectors can see what is inside. Whenever they see that the segregation is a failure, they will just not collect the trash bag, allowing it to pile up and become an embarrassing feature of the neighborhood, which puts enormous pressure on community members to get their trash segregation right. To make things a little bit more interesting, homeowners are supposed to label their trash bags, so everyone knows who that offender is. Although from what I hear, they are still far from an ideal society as a lot of people still fail to label their trash.
Their obsession with trash, sorting, recycling, and the involvement and pressure on the community is something I do not think we can ever have in the Philippines, but perhaps we can still learn something from them. The thing is, the Japanese made solid waste management so much of a priority that it has become a significant part of their life and culture. The members of their communities not only sort their trash properly, managing to follow all the complicated rules that vary from town to town, but their commitment even extends to not providing trash bins in public spaces because it messes up the program and they trust that the locals know what to do with their trash. As for the tourists, they can just force themselves to adapt.
Are we ever going to be as committed to anything as far as our communities or nation is concerned? Or do we just give things a few tries and then promptly give up? With so many issues that need to be addressed, such as trash, traffic, corruption, and gross inefficiencies, is it still within our culture to commit to an initiative or solution and see it through? Or are we forever doomed to always be catching up, because we can’t step up, even for simple matters like trash segregation or the simplest of traffic rules?*
