It is 2 p.m. in Shibuya. You have finished a canned coffee. You look around for a bin.
There is a machine that will sell you hot corn soup. There is a robot in the window of a phone shop. There is a man dressed as a strawberry, working. There is no bin.
You walk for eleven minutes holding the can. You pass a park. No bin. You pass a police box. No bin. Eventually you put it in your bag, next to your passport, and something inside you quietly changes forever.
The bins mostly disappeared after March 1995, when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway. In the security review that followed, public containers were reclassified in the national imagination as places where bad things get left. They were removed, and then — this is the strange part — nobody ever really asked for them back.
What replaced them is a social contract so quiet that most Japanese people cannot articulate it when asked: your garbage is yours. It is not the street's garbage. You produced it, you are holding it, you will take it home.
This gets built early. Japanese children clean their own classrooms — every day, for twelve years, including the toilets. There is no cleaning staff to blame and no adult doing it for you. By fifteen you have personally scrubbed a floor that somebody else made dirty, and you have felt the specific irritation of that. It turns out to be very hard to grow up doing that and then casually drop a bottle in a street.
The practical version, so you survive: convenience stores have bins for things bought at that store. Vending machines have a bottles-and-cans bin beside them and only that. Train station bins live past the ticket gates. Everything else goes in your bag. Buy a small plastic bag on day one. Welcome to the club, you are now a person who carries their own rubbish across a city.
Everyone assumes Japan is clean because the system is strict. It is the opposite. There is no system. There is no bin to enforce, no fine anyone is realistically going to issue, no camera pointed at you. Japan is not clean because it is watched. Japan is clean because 125 million people are each carrying their own garbage home, right now, on trust — and that is a far weirder and more fragile thing than a rule.
- Japanese football fans cleaning the stadium after World Cup matches was never a PR stunt. It made global news and confused people here, because the alternative — leaving your rubbish for a stranger — did not occur to them as an option.
- Household waste sorting runs from 4 categories to, in the town of Kamikatsu, forty-five. Residents there have a chart. They have had it since 2003.
- The word doing all the work is 迷惑 (meiwaku): the state of being a nuisance to others. It is not a law. It is stronger than a law.