“Hello everybody! If you have any unusable motorbikes, refrigerators, air conditioners, or other similar garbage please put it out now,” the cheerful message accompanied by sickly sweet music blasting from megaphones attached to a small truck announces. I look at my clock; it is 8:30am on Saturday. I close my eyes again and try to get back to sleep hoping that the driver won’t decide to make another sweep of this area. None of these trucks seem to have a consistent schedule and it requires a bit of luck to have the right type of garbage and actually be home at the right time. That reminds me, I still have a sofa sitting at the back of my house from three years ago that I haven’t managed to catch the right truck for. I count my blessings that it isn’t political season where a constant stream of vehicles winds its way through the neighborhood at all hours of the day blaring ‘vote for me’ messages.
Most of us have laws against that kind of activity in our home countries, usually filed under public disturbance or noise pollution. But if there are any similar laws against fitting vehicles with static ridden megaphones and blaring music, messages, or advertisements here in Japan, no one pays any attention.
Of the bunch my personal favorites are the painted black vans and buses with gold Sakura (cherry blossom) emblems adorning the sides belting out old school Japanese music. Why? Well, the answer is two-fold. The first is that they are driven by mean looking old men wearing big dark sunglasses (which is cool) and the music is kind of nostalgic (even though I wasn’t even alive when it was made). The second is that the people behind these vans/buses are the Japanese Nationalist Party and they hate foreigners with a passion moving towards an endgame of getting all of ‘us’ out of the country. They’re not doing that bad either with the help of a new government program of paying immigrant workers to permanently leave the country and imposing some interesting new legislations to make it even more difficult to live here.
In the end I will have to say that winter here wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t hear the same voice wailing year after year “yaaaaaakkiiiimmooooo” (roughly translated to fried sweet potatoes) from the back of a small truck belching steam from a cooker (sometimes fake) as it slowly creeps down the street. I’m sure they’re tasty but in 5 years of living here I have yet to buy a single one, go figure.
