Adventures in Japan

Car­olie is a self described “Navy Wife liv­ing over­seas.” Her blog is all about her loca­tion and is called Adven­tures in Japan. As we have read before of folks liv­ing in another coun­try other than place of birth, there is much to which you must adjust. In the United States, we have a soci­ety that oozes waste. And no mat­ter how “green” we are, most of us always face a trade-off: doing the right thing or doing the easy thing.

In Japan, much of the choice is made for you by law. Car­olie writes of trash day, “They won’t take trash with­out the right labels, or in the wrong bags, or in the wrong place. If you run out of labels before the end of the year, you have to PURCHASE more–and the pur­chased ones are very vivid green or pur­ple, so every­one in the neigh­bor­hood knows YOU were a waste­ful per­son and a bad cit­i­zen. Com­bustible trash is picked up twice a week–Wednesday and Sat­ur­day (!!) for us. Non-combustible trash (aerosol cans, hair dry­ers(!) metal caps, etc.) is col­lected once a month. Kitchen waste, like orange peel, is con­sid­ered com­bustible trash, but the gov­ern­ment will sub­si­dize your pur­chase of some sort of machine that I *think* is a com­post bin. I have to wait until I can check with Sayuri, my Japan­ese hous­ing coun­selor on the base, for a translation.”

The post is titled Gomi– Japan­ese Trash is Seri­ous Busi­ness and was writ­ten over two years ago on April 23, 2006. It is a great start­ing point to learn of this American’s life in Japan. The Ris­ing Blog­ger is proud to award this post our Post of the Day!

Review writ­ten by BUD WEISER.