Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

At some point though, I was cycling along the coast of Mie then Wakayama prefectures, and although the scenery and roads were clean, I had a glance just behind the ramp walk, and realized that behind the trees, in the bush next to the road were hundreds of garbage bags, litter of all sort, really anything, just lying below. There was such a contrast from what my eyes were seeing until, I was shocked.

In another town several kilometres after (I forgot which place exactly, must have been while cycling up towards Wakayama city), I passed next to a big commercial area on my right. On my left there was a small patch of forest then the sea and again, that forest contained many many plastic bags, full but neatly tied up, every couple of meters or so, for several hundreds of meters.

I originally thought the first thrashes I saw along the road in the country side where "mistakes", like things flying off the window or pushed by the wind from another place (although there was a lot of garbage anyway). But when I saw these tied up plastic bags, they weren't there by chance, really people throw these bags away on the forest right here. That made me a bit sad, especially since it broke the original image I got.

(And I haven't spoke about the beaches and seafront all along that peninsula; I wouldn't walk bare foot there).

Then I came home in Switzerland, looked up the small water stream close to my place, and realized it wasn't as neat as one can see at first glance... So I should probably start with that before criticising other countries sigh

Even compared to Americans, we are terrible litterers. You can see this in people’s behaviours in fast food restaurants: in the US (as in many other countries), customers will bin their food wrappers and return their tray when they leave. Even groups of kids will typically do this: it’s just habit. In the UK, typical customers will just leave their mess at the table when they leave. Cleaning is someone else’s job.

One morning in Tokyo, I saw construction workers starting to dig up a street. It was a large operation, they were exposing some massive pipes, and there were a few policemen, politely pointing pedestrians to a way around the site.

In the evening I went the same way again, to see how far they had gotten with the digging. However, there was no hole anymore. They were already done, and the street looked like new, with hardly a trace of what had happened.

I felt kinda bad about my place (Germany), where this would have taken at least a week.

I was in Osaka this weekend and litter is everywhere. By far one of the dirtiest major cities I’ve seen in East Asia. In the city I live in in Japan, the rice fields are full of coffee cans, plastic bottles, and bento packaging thrown out from cars. Streets are covered in cigarette butts and somehow I see natto containers in the middle of nowhere. Going hiking, I see tea bottles and plastic bags from convenience stores all over the damn place.

Most parts of Tokyo and cities with tourism are generally clean because there are heavy cleanup operations. People are still littering just like everywhere else.

> Invisible dirt – germs and bacteria – are another source of concern. When people catch colds or flu, they wear surgical masks to avoid infecting other people.

But you’ll never catch people washing their hands and grandpas always pull down their mask to cough so as to not dirty it. I caught a news program during flu season last year telling people how to avoid the flu. Their recommendations? Keep your stomach wrapped and extra warm, and drink green tea since it cures influenza.

I was in Osaka earlier in the week, and Kyoto after that. And these cities were also quite clean and orderly, with Osaka being the most orderly (and much more relaxed and slow paced, which makes order easier).

One of my favorite parts of Japan's cleanliness is their cars. They are all sparkling. Even the delivery trucks are shiny and splatter free! The gas/petrol station near me had at least two attendeds at each car, one to pump, and the other to clean the car's windows and paint!

Another fascinating thing is how escalators have two lanes, one for walking and one for standing. Why doesn't everyone so this?! It's so perfect!

Others in this thread don't speak too highly of Osaka, but it was definitely the most orderly and trash free of the three cities I've visited. Of course, these cities are quite huge, compared to cities in the US, so perhaps these conversations should be more fine grained, generalizing by prefecture rather than city.

I've found that I've been lining my things up neatly, and organizing my clothes and toiletries here in my in my hotel. It's been inspiring to see all the order here.

In Korea (and AFAIK Japan too), people very care of what other people think about them. They consider the consequences of every action carefully. One of the results is that people generally don't litter in front of other people, and that makes the city clean. The places without much people, they are dirtier than others because there aren't other people around them.

As much as that surprised me, it also kind of didn't because there are people working everywhere on everything all the time. The number of concrete mixers driving around was amazing. Infrastructure is never finished and always seems to be well funded. I feel kind of embarrassed when I see Japanese people visiting my city, like they've come to some kind of pioneer town with our litter everywhere, far too many cars for the available roads and with our laughably inadequate public transit infrastructure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

and as a result, they have four times the rate of involuntarily locking people up for mental illness as the average:

> For the last 40 years mental health care has shifted from hospital-based settings to community-based ones in most countries. As a result the number of psychiatric care beds has fallen considerably internationally (Glasby & Tew, 2015:106). More and more people with mental disorders are living and being cared for in the community. In contrast, Japan still has a very high ratio of psychiatric care beds per capita among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with 269 beds per 100,000 population compared to the average of 68 (OECD, 2014:11).

http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S...

The cities were noticeably cleaner than Swedish cities though, a lot fewer chewing gums and cigarette butts from what I remember.

My friend concluded that much of it had to do with collectivism vs individualism. Either way I think Americans need to improve their bathroom etiquette.

It's interesting that years back there was a man with mental health issues who carried out attacks by putting chemicals in garbage cans in public places. After this Japan got rid of garbage cans in public. Most of them, at least.

You walk downtown Tokyo and there are no garbage cans and no garbage anywhere. Every once in a while you come across a small convenience store with a very small can inside or every 10 or so vending machines will have a small bin for bottles or cans. But for the most part Japan is EXTREMELY clean. The city can be old, but it's all still clean.

Go to Shibuya, the famous crossing with thousands of people. Show up there in the morning before rush hour and you'll see very few people, and the streets are all clean. No garbage anywhere.

There's a good chance it was tourists as they had brought in skip bins that were all overflowing to the point where the skip was sitting in a mound of rubbish.

Seems not having bins in public places cuts down littering as there is no expectation that you can dump your rubbish and someone else will deal with it. A similar thing happened in Brisbane when they removed all the public bins for the G20. The few remaining bins were all overflowing with litter everywhere or people dumped rubbish where they used to be.

Is it to stop germs from spraying in the air or is it more a polite thing? Or maybe to avoid having to carry the soiled tissue.

Do they hide in an alley to do it?

A:Because there is a horde of foreign workers doing the cleaning up.

What'll it be this time? Communism? Authoritarianism?

This is a mostly invisible issue for tourists since trash collection happens in the morning and people take the trash out the night before, so the piles of trash and animals are visible at night mostly.

And they then enter the convinis (warning, gross rats inside convini):

https://twitter.com/Ginkai19990324/status/115807601769873408...