Author, Michelle Gross
Published 4 minutes ago
Reading time: 3 minutes
From a deadly 1995 attack to deeply ingrained social norms, the reasons for Japan's scarcity of trash cans are more complicated than they appear.
If you spend a day sightseeing in Tokyo, you may find yourself carrying empty coffee cups, 7-Eleven egg sandwich wrappers, and a growing sense of confusion. Japan is famous for its emphasis on cleanliness, so why can’t it find a place to throw away trash?
The obsession is familiar to many travelers and has spawned countless social media videos of bewildered tourists searching for trash cans on immaculate streets.
However, the answer is more complicated than it appears.
"This is a complex interweaving of historical developments, economic phenomena, political events and their various influences on how people choose to act," said Eiko Maruko Siniawer, a history professor at Williams College and author of Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan.
Japan has not always been a country lacking trash cans. Siniavo pointed out that March 1995 was a major turning point in Japanese trash can culture. At that time, members of Aum Shinrikyō released sarin gas during the morning rush hour on three Tokyo subway lines, killing 14 people and injuring thousands more. After the incident, authorities sealed or removed trash cans out of concern for terrorism.
Subsequently, successive terrorist attacks around the world, including the 9/11 incident in the United States, further prompted the continuation of these measures. Thirty years on, however, safety considerations alone can no longer explain why so few trash bins have been restored, nor why Japan can still maintain astonishing tidiness.
Cost and practical necessity are partly to blame. Aya Yoshida of Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies said that since the 2000s, some local governments have deliberately reduced the number of trash cans on the streets to encourage people to take their garbage home for disposal.
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Yoshida added: "In the case of Kyoto, the number of street trash cans has been cut by more than half since 2011 due to problems such as household waste being thrown into street trash cans and garbage accumulating around the trash cans, which has led to rising costs of maintaining and managing these trash cans."
So why isn’t there more trash on the streets? Yoshida cautions that Japan’s tidiness should not be attributed to some kind of Japanese-specific sense of neatness. She emphasized that clean streets are also the result of deliberate policies implemented over many years.
"For decades, local governments have invested in anti-littering campaigns, public education, street cleaning and environmental design measures to deter littering," she said.
But social norms are just as important, she said. One of them is "meiwaku o kakenai", the concept of avoiding causing trouble to others. Daily habits also play a role: eating on the go is relatively uncommon in Japan, so people generally don't create much waste when they go out.
"In terms of my own daily patterns, I'm not sure how much waste is generated on the way to and from work. Since eating while walking or riding a train is not common in Japan, there are less opportunities to create waste on the way," Siniava said.
Of course, tourists experience cities differently. They tend to spend long hours sightseeing, buying drinks and convenience store snacks, and are therefore more likely to find themselves carrying rubbish along the way without an obvious place to dispose of it.
Junko Yokoo, a tour guide living in Japan, said the difficulty of finding trash cans was initially confusing and frustrating for tourists. But many people quickly adapt.
"At first, my clients often complained about not being able to find trash cans, but they also liked seeing the streets clear of trash and gradually learned to accept the 'as the Romans do when in town' mentality," she said.
Despite what tourists might think, trash cans are not completely gone, you just have to know where to look, Siniavo added.
