Greetings 1

Trashy life

Hello! I’m here!

I thought long and hard about how to start this new series. I wanted to craft a nice entry, a sort of introduction, then I realized that Greetings is meant to be just a slice-of-life chronicle, so why not start in mid-action? Life, after all, is messy and random, consistently defeating our best intentions to give it a coherent shape.

So here I am, at 7:00 a.m., taking out the trash. Let me see… today is Tuesday so my garbage bag is full of tin cans and plastic bottles.

In his 1937 work, A Book of Hours, American botanist, naturalist and author Donald Culross Peattie writes that humanity “divides itself into those who are slug-abeds, and think themselves the finer for it, and those who must arise and shine” early in the morning. “Translate the classification into biological terminology and you have the nocturnal people and the diurnal.”

Early mornings are “peculiarly the propriety not of great men but of the common ones. And it is precisely these folks who are most often abroad at this hour. A man (…) goes down for his paper; he opens his front door” and “morning washes impetuously in (…) with a spray of sunlight and a laughter of fresh smells. (…) For a moment he looks (…) at the serenity that even street trees have, at the deep perspective of shadow.”

I’m certainly the diurnal type and dealing with the trashy things of life is one of my house chores. Many countries now have complicated rules about waste disposal, recycling, etc. Each day is devoted to a different kind of garbage, as you can see in the picture below.

This is not from my neighborhood but some place in Kawasaki. As you can see, Tuesdays in this area are devoted to “ordinary garbage.” The English translations add a nice touch.

Every neighborhood has its own self-appointed “garbage Nazis” who make sure nobody takes out the wrong kind of trash or does it after collection time. I remember one morning of many years ago when I was running late for work. At that time, I was living in a condo in Tokyo. My apartment was on the fifth floor and we didn’t have an elevator. I flew down the stairs, dumped my garbage bag at the corner and was about to rush to the subway station when someone called my name.

“Simone-san, don’t you remember the garbage truck is not coming today? It’s a special holiday or something.”

I froze, uncertain about what to do next. Trying to reason with the lady would be just a waste of time. My only options were to either take my bag back home and miss my train or doing an “Italian job.” I chose the second one: I pretended to head back to my condo then darted toward the station and unashamedly squeezed the bag into a trash can outside a convenience store.

In my neighborhood in Yokohama, everybody used to just leave our bags at an appointed collection point but the neighbors’ cats and especially the crows would regularly raid the spots, tear the plastic bags to shreds, have a party and leave behind a mess, so nets were provided to protect the bags.

But the ever-resourceful crows sometimes managed to squeeze under the nets. So the next technological leap was to install foldable boxes, like these ones.

The paper waste left outside the boxes doesn’t run the risk of being eaten by the crows.

Some estate agents even go so far as to add big billboards warning people

• not to put their bags in other condo’s boxes

• carefully sort out their trash

• not to leave any bags outside the boxes

The Japanese love rules. And they like cute images, like the crows in the following picture.

Tokyo. Yokohama and other major Japanese cities have huge armies of crows. Near my place there are many rice fields and orchards, so I’m sure the crows have other means to stuff their bellies.

Doesn’t this photo remind you of a famous film?

Hey, here’s a QUIZ for you!

There’s something strange - let’s say an incongruity - in one of the pictures I posted. Can you spot it? Leave your answer in the comment section. The first person who finds it will get a complimentary paid subscription!

---