Living in a cramped Japanese home means living close to your trash, but there’s an easy way to make the situation easier on your nose.
trash
Shocked net users lament the beachside paradise littered with garbage–an uncommon occurrence in usually tidy Japan.
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If you dare to litter in Tokyo, you’d better watch out, because there’s a team of fearsome samurai warriors ready to admonish you.
Online artist takes a swipe at Halloween party-goers and the sea of trash they leave in their wake.
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Celebration’s image tarnished in recent years as partiers leave huge amounts of trash on the streets.
Especially when he blatantly disregards the law by putting it out on the wrong day for recyclables.
Remember when everyone’s minds were blown by images of Japanese fans tidying up their section after the World Cup? Well what might seem amazing to some is totally atarimae (obvious and expected) to the typical Japanese mindset. As your mother may have told you as a kid; you make the mess, you tidy it up! And the day after the massive Halloween party at the famous Shibuya crossing last weekend, volunteers were out in droves this year again with plastic bags and gloves to make the streets all sparkly again.
But just how many of them actually even contributed to the mess to begin with? According to reports on Twitter, not too many—and boy, are they angry…
The insane queues for the release of Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus were reported by media outlets around the world, but what fewer of them have picked up on is the aftermath of the hype, and what was left behind once Apple fans had got their mitts on the latest slinky gadgets.
Japanese soccer fans attracted plenty of praise at the World Cup last month when, having watched their team lose to Ivory Coast, they diligently cleaned up their trash from the stadium. Whether you think these supporters’ actions show how important it is to Japanese people to be considerate of others, or just good old-fashioned common sense that applies wherever you are in the world, everyone (well, almost everyone) agreed that taking your rubbish home with you is A Good Thing.
This week, however, Japanese Twitter users have breathed a collective disappointed sigh as photos of the trash left in the streets after the world-famous Sumida River Fireworks Festival show some people in Japan aren’t as super-considerate as we’d like to think. Is Tokyo an exception to the rules? Or is Japan’s reputation as a super-clean nation undeserved?
Is Japan’s recycling system the most complicated in the world? It sure feels like it sometimes. Household waste must of course be separated into burnable and non-burnable, but after that there’s a dizzying array of recycling categories to break your non-burnables into. Since Japan is a relatively small country without masses of land to use for burying waste, the vast majority of waste used to be incinerated. However, with increasing ecological awareness in the 1990s came new legislation to minimise the amount of waste being burnt, and promote recycling.
Public awareness of the need to recycle is high, but the system can be baffling for new foreign residents. The problem lies not only in the array of recycling categories, but also in the apparent overlap between them: the grey areas. Is an empty pizza box considered recycled paper? Or is it burnable? Paper packages? “Other”? And if a bottle is made of a different type of plastic to the standard PET, is still a “pet bottle”, or is it just “plastic”?
Today we bring you six reasons to learn what goes in what box, and a few hints for getting it right along the way.
Another winter Comiket has come and, unfortunately, gone. Though we have to say that fans probably welcome a break after a few days of hustling from booth to booth, and the convenience stores are most definitely glad for some respite. On the other hand, we can only imagine how overwhelmed the cleaning crews must be right now.
If only more fans were more like this sexy, young gentleman; the cleaning crews’ work would be cut by half!
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