00:00:00 John Daub: Greetings to sunny Tokyo. This episode will help you figure out what to do with your trash like this coffee from a popular chain. After you're done with it, where exactly do you throw it away? There are trash cans all over the city. You can't apparently see any right now. I'm standing here where I was just 24 hours ago to talk about this topic. And you can see in the picture in the thumbnail of this video, there are actually trash cans. They look like this in the most part. But there are a lot more places to throw it away.

00:00:31 John Daub: I was reading the comments of yesterday's live stream about the bad tourists. There were a lot of people over the course of the last 10 days that I noticed that were doing stuff like this. You can see just leaving their trash on the Shinkansen. It created problems because I understand you see the tourists on the top right. I can understand why you would leave the trash perhaps like thinking that it was more like an airplane. But the Shinkansen makes numerous stops en route. They got off at Shin-Osaka. They got off at Kyoto. And there was still Kyoto, Nagoya, Shin-Osaka, Shinagawa to go. So people coming in thought that somebody was sitting at this seat. So nobody sat there. I took the trash, threw it away. And then at Nagoya, somebody finally sat at that seat. But nobody from Kyoto and the train was crowded, got on there thinking that somebody was sitting there. So this is sort of an issue with many people here in Japan. But like what do I do when we're done with this? Because we've come here to Tokyo Station to go out to lunch. And I found a local who you might want to talk to.

00:01:39 Local: So like where would you throw this away now that you're done with it? We're almost done with it. We're going to go to the restaurant. What do you do with it? Maybe I go back to the shop. Well, maybe I bring back to my house. Well, when I'm walking, if I found a garbage trash, it's like garbage box. It's lucky. I can throw it.

00:02:04 John Daub: Basically, people will bring the trash back home with them. Quite frankly, we came here by bicycle. We probably put it in the bicycle basket. And then carry it home and then throw it away there. But I want to show you that, you know, I found some trash cans in here. I hope that this is really useful for you. So this is inside of Tokyo Station. You can see here. Look at that right at the entrance of Tokyo Station. It's almost impossible not to figure this out because it's also marked in English. Newspapers, magazines in there, cans, glass bottles, plastic bottles, PET bottles, Coca-Cola, things like that. Tea, plastics, bento boxes into that orange one and then paper and wood. The other stuff that you would burn would go into the red one there and see a lady just put the trash in there. There's see-through and there's a reason why for that. This is the one on the platform of the Shinkansen. Newspapers, cans. But there's other ones where you can separate the glass and the PET bottles here. This is what they look like. You can find them.

00:03:04 John Daub: They're see-through because of the reason they don't have trash cans in Tokyo because of what happened in 1995. We'll talk about that in a second. Inside of the building where we're at right now, we found a burnable and non-burnable trash bags right in the building across the street. So that's probably where we're going to be throwing away this garbage cans. Everybody says Japan doesn't have garbage cans. Yeah, maybe not on the street. But one place that you should not be throwing garbage is here. These are meant for recyclables for PET bottles and cans. You can tell there's a sign right there. It's pretty easy. Common sense says don't throw your normal trash away there. And even if you look up at the top of it, if I pan up here, you can see they actually put in here other garbage. No. Plastic bottles, cans. Yes. So it's pretty easy to see that you can't throw it away.

00:03:51 John Daub: Or the other option was we could go to the Starbucks and we can throw the trash away at the place where we bought it. You see right there, they have the burnable and non-burnable trash right there and you don't even have to do. Yeah. There's trash right there. You don't even have to be a Starbucks customer. You can just sort your paper garbage here and the plastic garbage there at a local FamilyMart. You can see right at the entrance they have garbage cans. They look like this. You just burnable, which would be everything else to be on the left PET bottles, cans on the right. I think it's pretty easy to figure this out. It's not too hard. I'm actually carrying a plastic bag with me. You can get these for about three yen at actually if you ask at the convenience store or even at the supermarket, they'll give you this for three or five yen, which is about three cents. Carry one with you and if you need it, you can put in things that you're eating. But if you've got a lot of garbage and you have a different problem, you're just going to have to throw it away from where you stay, which is what normal people probably would be doing. You're not walking around carrying food. Most people would be at a restaurant or eating, you know, at that place. You don't really carry around stuff that you got to throw away. If you've got paper on you, maybe you're going to put it in your pocket. Do you have any questions here? I think this is pretty self-explanatory.

00:05:18 John Daub: Now, the reason why Japan doesn't have any trash cans, I found this. In the Japan Times ran an article a long time ago about the trash cans are making a comeback and they kind of explain the reason why Japan doesn't have trash cans here. And a lot of it stems back to when they took them out initially was in 1995 during the sarin gas attack. Remember that on the Hibiya line? There was a terrorist attack. People died on that from like a yeah, from a messed up group. A lot of them were Japan was looking for this group for a very long time. The article mentions this following the 1995. The poison gas terrorist attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Tokyo waste receptacles disappeared from many public spaces in Japan, though they can now be found in heavy traffic areas like major train stations. I just showed you that. The thing is, they brought they took these out. And this is what happened as a result in 1995. When I came here in 98, I was also thinking the same thing like where the trash cans that accident was pretty fresh. You saw that the wanted posters from the police everywhere for those people who did the attack.

00:06:34 John Daub: I think that's what happened. Nowadays, there's a kind of a need for them because foreign tourists don't understand the culture of taking your trash home. And the result was, this is super interesting here. I'm going to pull this up. This is from the article. Having the trash cans on the street actually made the city and we're talking about Osaka dirtier because people would bring their food waste from home, throw it there and it would overflow and make the area smell. This is kind of true. I hope that tourists will have the manners to bring their trash home or return it to the stores that they bought the food from which makes a lot of sense here. Still, there remains opposition to trash cans by local governments, including Osaka itself. There's tech garbage cans being installed at the tombs, buddy, where they're using technology to try to figure this out. Smart trash cans. So this is one alternative where they're putting it in public spaces. But I think it's a good idea to have a trash can.

00:07:35 John Daub: But after the trash cans were taken away in 1995, something weird happened. The city was actually cleaner. Good people took the trash home. The birds, the crows didn't take the trash out of it and make a mess in the area which was an issue. The city actually looked like this. So, it's, it's been about 20-30 years since that happened. That's one of the reasons and other souls followed suit after Tokyo because of this. And now in a lot of areas that we've Asian cities they took the public trash cans away and they found that it was cleaner go figure so maybe that's an answer for a lot of other cities but the culture is different this is a culture of responsibility this happened I'll do another episode on this because we want to we do want to go out to lunch but I'll show you Tokyo Station as we get ready to go there can I we can go and make this next traffic light I think you don't see a lot of trash if you do it's probably come by from the wind and gets picked up pretty quickly can I found trash what did you find we found somebody who's right here yeah we found that PET bottle right there we're gonna throw it away inside of the building where we showed you the trash receptacle and recycle bin good on you can I good job yeah thank you for the thumbs up from Singapore buddy I appreciate it.

00:09:03 John Daub: But the thing is you know the Japanese education system in school you learn about personal responsibility this happened when the curriculum was in place and the curriculum kind of changed after World War Two after the Meiji government came in they modernized the curriculum and then after World War Two it became more of a US standard from you know the elementary junior high in high school and as a result of that I guess it was around the curriculum kind of changed in the 1960s and 70s Japan was awfully dirty right your otosan jidai it smelled Kawasaki and the Sumida River were polluted. I remember reading a Time magazine back in 1980 when I was in third grade and you saw the traffic cops in Tokyo with masks on it was awfully dirty it's not that this you know that Japan was a clean place historically that's not true they didn't have underground sewers until like the 1950s and 60s in a lot of places and that's why the manhole covers have those designs to promote it was used as a way to promote the fact that we had underground sewers here in Japan back then so the cleanliness didn't really start to come in around the 1980s where the bushido men didn't come in just test in school and as long as you have you can go into the teachers' room, they'll go, what exactly do you want from the others because they don't want you looking for anything else, simply just everyone including us! Morality and personal responsibility became like a course at school. And people started to do the right thing, meaning cleaning up the things that they saw around them. So this culture of having this cleanliness of an amazing city that we are so proud to live in, didn't really come about until the 1980s. I made an episode, you might want to check it out, on how they clean Ueno Station about two years ago. I went in and I watched them 24 hours how the staff keeps the Japanese station clean. It's phenomenal. But what was most interesting, interviewing the old timers, it was never like that. Back in the 1960s and 70s, you could smell the urine on the platforms, newspapers, cigarette butts. It was a nasty, nasty place back then. Some of the people who are watching this might be able to attest to that. But it's something that, you know, is still fresh in the minds of people that are born after, you know, baby boomers. And, you know, now that if you're coming to Japan, you're going to be able to see the beautiful country.

00:11:13 Kanae Daub: Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. At the station, they have a, some, how do you say, like a bin, some box. Right. So they spit on there. They spit in the trash box back in the olden days, like China. It's a spit folder box. A spit box. A spittoon. For, yeah, you know, some people smoking, they do tons, you know. Yeah. So they got like... That's like a culture. That's not so unusual.

00:11:47 John Daub: I was in China in 1998, and I remember riding bicycles in Beijing. They don't, now everything is cars, but in 98, it was all bicycles. And I got, I got hit directly with spit. Now, if you go to Beijing, you don't see the spitting culture as much anymore. But apparently Japan was a spitting country. Wow. Yeah. Before. Before. Long, long, long time ago. They had spittoons, like in the Wild West. That's nasty, man. I wouldn't want to be the person that had to clean that. Stand spitters. All right, guys, thanks for that. I hope this is, this follow-up to the episode yesterday is helpful to you. But hope that you can find those trash cans. They're everywhere. Most people are going to be going to places like this, the FamilyMart or the Lawson's or the convenience stores. If you've got big bundles of trash, it's not going to fit in there. And that's probably rude to put that in there. Because the convenience store has to pay for this. But convenience stores are for convenience. And they will take your trash like a paper cup like this. But for us, for us, we're just going to throw it away in their receptacle. Okay, let's do that. And then we're going to say goodbye to you. We've got to go to lunch. Let's put that, let's put that PET bottle and the trash away. And it's as easy as this. Yeah, here it is right here inside of the Marunouchi building. Boom. Incombustibles, which are the PET bottle that you found, can go in there.

00:13:25 Kanae Daub: And... This is [inaudible]. Oh, my gosh. So you take the... Look at that. She's separating the garbage. And paper, burnable, burnable, and non-burnable. We can't put this one. Because it's not... I don't know.

00:13:40 John Daub: What are you doing there? It's okay. Just put it to the side maybe. I don't know. You're stuck with it. You picked it up. Yeah. I guess you could just take it downstairs and put it in the drink receptacle. I don't know. All right. We've got to do the right thing. Go to the restroom and empty it out. All right, everybody. We can find it, yeah. Tokyo is garbage. Mata ne. See you later. Bye.