Can anyone please tell me where I can find a trash bin in this country? It’s been about 20 minutes of searching and I still have my empty chocolate milk carton and donut wrappers in hand. I’m not in the countryside; I’m actually in a major city with plenty of stores and restaurants around me, even a large train station, but no place to throw my garbage. The ground around me is pristine, not a scrap of litter to be seen, so trash must go somewhere. Won’t someone please let me know where?
You know that saying, ‘there’s never a cop around when you need one?’ Well, for Japan change that to ‘there is never a trash can around when you need one,’ because there are plenty of cops here (they can be helpful but are rarely useful) but hardly any garbage bins.
For the number of (actually convenient) convenience stores and enthusiastically wrapped food items you would expect that the city, in order to keep the streets clean, would want to put trash bins in convenient locations (like in parks, on streets, around train stations) but apparently this is not the case.
I do have to admit that the number of places I can (rightly) put trash has been increasing. However, I feel that this is not in response to the logical need to provide places to dispose of trash but out of desperation to prevent the streets from being overrun with clear plastic wrappers and water bottles. If there is no garbage people place trash wherever they want to because they feel that someone else will take care of it, and they are usually right. Even if there is a garbage can nearby there is still a good percentage of people who won’t bother to use it.
I have seen kids unwrap onigiri (rice-ball) and simply drop the wrapper at their feet (I told them to pick up their d@mn wrapper and put it in a bin but where a bin was I have no idea). I have seen adults place garbage on ledges as they pass by. I have seen couples sit down by the Kamo River, talk for a while, then get up leaving their trash behind to blow away in the even though there was a bin conveniently located on the path to the street (which they walked up). How I wish these were isolated incidents but they are not (note the plurals on everything). To combat these people I have resorted to dirty looks, tapping on shoulders and occasionally picking up after them.
I guess for now I’m just going to put my garbage in the opaque plastic bag my purchase came with and stuff it in my backpack. Hopefully the leftover chocolate milk won’t leak and stain my notebook. That, and hopefully I won’t forget it only to be reminded a few days later by a pleasant odor…
Only in Japan.
