Long CountdownNick Ramsay, blogging from Japan.

In Part 1 I talked about how the gomi (rubbish) rules had changed and that everything had to be separated and put out on fixed days between 6 and 8am. However, being unable to wake up at that crazy time of day, I often threw things out the night before. This was fine until the gomi patrol caught me.

The gomi station where I had to throw out my rubbish was manned by a bunch of old ladies between those unearthly hours in the morning. Of course, every week they would arrive to find my gomi waiting for them from the night before.

One morning, having only gotten home at about 4am, I was asleep when I heard voices in my kitchen!

As I said in Part 1, I didn’t bother locking my door because it was such a safe country and I didn’t expect anyone to trouble a 6ft foreigner.  However, woken by voices in my kitchen, I jumped out of my futon to confront the intruders.

Two old ladies were standing there holding two bags of gomi that I had thrown out just hours earlier. I was half asleep at the time so I can’t remember if I had used the wrong bags, mixed up my gomi, or put the wrong rubbish out on the wrong day, but they had searched through the rubbish to find my address on an envelope and had come to slap my wrists!

I apologised and they left in peace, but I learned from that experience to always lock my door. I also tried to be more careful to do things right.

A year later I was living in a different apartment. By now, gomi bags were color-coded to match their content, labelled with the name of the city, and you had to write your name on the bags (not that anyone did though). Things were getting extreme.

My kitchen was once again lined with bags for the different kinds of gomi, and since I didn’t wake up in time to throw them out, my balcony was filling up with rubbish. One bag in particular was starting to haunt me. It was filled with difficult-to-classify things and was growing mold. After a while it was too filthy to even try and sort out so I covered it in another bag and left it on the balcony.

Eventually, it was time to move to my fifth apartment so I made every effort to chuck out the bags. All except the gross one which I just threw in the truck to take to my new place. Meanwhile, I decided to throw out all my old clothes, and this time I reverted back to a night-time clear out.

The next morning on my way to work, I was so embarrassed to see my old clothes strewn all over the street! I think the old homeless people from the park across the street had been through my bags looking for something nice to wear. Anyway, I acted as if they weren’t my clothes and continued on my way to work.

So I moved to another city, towing the gross rubbish bag with me, and once I got there, it found its new home on the balcony where it sat for another two years. When it came to moving again, I just stuck it in another bag and brought it to my current apartment, in yet another different city.

Needless to say my wife, Mami, wasn’t to keen on having this rubbish bag on the balcony so she threw a tantrum and got me to take it to the city’s incinerator. By now, I had covered it in yet another bag and put it in a box.

When I got to the incinerator, they asked me if my rubbish was from this city and I assured them it was. They even opened the box and saw the city’s name on the bag. However, when the gomi guy opened the bag to check its contents, he found a different bag with a different city’s name. I assured him that I had just had that bag lying around but the gomi was definitely from this city. So he opened that bag and found another bag with a different name on it. Now, I was embarrassed. He gave me an evil look but opted not to push the matter. Opening that final bag revealed five year’s worth of mold and dead bugs. Without even attempting to identify the rubbish, he tossed it into the incinerator and I shed a tear as the gomi I had lived with all that time disappeared in smoke.

Fortunately, I have a collection of old computers, monitors, hard drives and graphics cards filling up my closet, so a new chapter in my ’rubbish story’ is beginning!

When I first came to Japan, rubbish disposal was as simple as dumping everything in a bag and putting in the street to be collected later in the week. Now, I’m not just talking about kitchen scraps here, I mean anything that people didn’t want, including TVs, refrigerators and all sorts.

The bubble economy had burst but people were in the habit of buying the latest technology and throwing out older models simply because they weren’t top-of-the-line. My friend Kazu and I would drive around the city looking for useful rubbish, or gomi. I was saddled with debt in my first year and lived on noodles, so it was great to find a TV, video recorder, coffee maker, bedding, kettle, and best of all, a washing machine lying in the streets around my apartment. This was gomi hunting at its best.

Kazu got his own apartment soon after I did, so he would regularly bring his dirty laundry round to my place so he could use the washing machine. Back in those days, Japan was so safe that I never felt I had to lock my door – very few people did, and Kazu was welcome to come in anytime.

Just one year later, after I had moved into my second of now six apartments(!), the laws changed dramatically. Separating rubbish was now essential, and many cities in Japan took this to extremes. Here’s a picture of gomi sorting instructions:

You can see how many categories there are. You’ve got burnable, unburnable, paper, plastic, polystyrene, glass, metal, cans, bottles and ‘big’ gomi.

So how do you go about sorting your gomi in a one-room apartment? Well, I would hang all the different bags from the kitchen cupboards, and when they were full I’d dump them on the balcony until collection day.

Oh yes, collection day. No longer could you just dump everything in the street but you had to put out your gomi between six and eight o’clock in the morning on the day that corresponded to the type of gomi you were throwing out!

As an ESL teacher I would usually work evenings, generally from 4-9:30pm. So getting up early was not my strong point, and since I was in my early twenties I would often go out to the bars and clubs until the early hours of the morning. This meant that I would bend the rules a bit by throwing out my gomi when I got home, always hoping the neighborhood gomi patrol wouldn’t see me. I’m serious, people from each neighborhood were chosen to oversee the gomi, making sure that it was of the right type and that it was all done between six and eight… not before!

One night I was chucking out cans for the morning can and bottle collection, when I figured I should empty an aerosol can which was among my rubbish. Since I didn’t have anything to make a hole in it, I just sprayed the remaining contents into the air. Then I saw a cat which was sniffing about the rubbish, and it started breakdancing and running around me in dazed circles. Then suddenly a car flew round the corner and hit it! The run-over cat looked at me with a pained expression, shook it’s leg in the air and then collapsed! Not knowing what to do I yelled at the driver to stop, which he did, and then he helped me…. put the cat with the gomi. Sorry cat lovers!

To be continued… Read Part 2.