They have become human garbage cans

Japan has spent decades elevating cleanliness to an almost competitive. It is not trivial, since even organize official championships garbage collection on the street, where teams compete to see who leaves the most impeccable environment. In a country where there are initiatives that turn civility into sport, the relationship with waste is not a minor detail, but a profound expression of how public space and individual responsibility are understood.

And yet, the arrival of hordes of tourists has revealed a paradox.

A clean country without trash cans. Yes, Japan has been surprising the world for decades with a paradox that baffles anyone who visits it for the first time: impeccable streets, sparkling stations and, at the same time, almost no garbage can in sight.

This absence is not a system failure, but a direct consequence of a culture who avoids eating while walking, prioritizes taking waste home and individually assumes the responsibility of not littering public spaces. For local people, buy something in a konbini or in a vending machine already implies having a mental plan to manage the packaging, a routine so internalized that it makes trash cans on the street unnecessary.

Garbage cans, but human. The problem appears when this cultural ecosystem collides with mass tourism. With dozens of million visitors a yearJapan has been filled with travelers who eat on the go, buy viral drinks and “Instagrammable” snacks and, when they finish, discover that there is nowhere to throw anything away.

The result is an image as absurd as it is revealing: hordes of tourists turned into human trash canswalking kilometers with glasses, wrappers and bottles in their pockets, backpacks or improvised bags. The official surveys they confirm it: For visitors, the lack of trash cans is already the main logistical problem of the trip, above the language or the crowds.

Local rules, foreign habits. The friction is not only due to the physical absence of cubes, but to a profound difference in habits. In Japan, eating while walking is frowned upon and, in some cities, it is outright prohibited.

“Takeaway” food is effectively taken home or to work. Tourists, on the other hand, consume on the street and expect to find an infrastructure similar to that of their countries of origin. When there is not one, the system suffers: scarce trash cans that overflow, waste abandoned in discreet corners and a growing tension between traditional Japanese courtesy and the reality of tourism that does not always know how (or can) adapt.

Safety, costs and trauma. Added to this equation is a less visible but decisive factor: security. After the sarin gas attack in the Aum Shinrikyo sect in the Tokyo subway in 1995, many trash cans were removed for fear that they were used to hide explosives, a logic that also explains why the few that exist usually have transparent bags.

Added to this are the maintenance costs and strict municipal regulations on public space. The result has been an urban landscape deliberately devoid of cubeseven when the social context that supported it has changed radically.

Cities that are beginning to give way. In any case, it counted the wall street journal in a report that the continued pressure of tourism is forcing some cities to rethink dogma. In especially saturated places, such as central Tokyo neighborhoods or busy historic parks, calls have begun to appear. “smart” binssometimes with messages in English, sensors or compaction systems.

Other initiatives border on the surreal, especially for the “foreigner” without any context, such as students who they walk with garbage cans behind their backs to collect waste in exchange for donations or advertising. That said, these are more of creative patches to a deeper culture clash: Japan hasn’t really changed its idea of ​​cleanliness, but the world has arrived en masse and without warning, and now millions of visitors travel around the country carrying their garbage on them, discovering that in the most tidy place on the planet… the bucket is them.

Image | PexelsCorpse Reviver

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