Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Sorting trash in Japan

I've recently been doing a bit of purging in my apartment, sorting through the small mountains of stuff that have slowly been collecting over the past two years of living here. Most of it is paper - old envelopes, magazines, junk mail, phone books, out-of-date tourist info and maps, old cards, half-finished lesson plans, and an overwhelming number of calendars, teaching resource books and "JET Journals" the good folks at CLAIR just keep on sending to us, year after year. Seriously, who needs FIVE calendars? I can understand one, maybe two (a big one to hang on your wall, and maybe a smaller one for your desk). They're quite pretty and useful in that they have all the Japanese holidays written in them. But five? Really? In a tiny Japanese apartment? They do suggest in the accompanying letter (itself a nice addition to my growing pile) that you can give the ones you don't need to coworkers and friends. But who am I supposed to be giving them to, really? Everything's written in English and all the people I know who could use an English calendar have themselves been inundated with too many. So we all end up with piles of unwanted crap, and nowhere to throw it away.

Which brings me to yet another interesting phenomena in Japan. People love packaging in this country. They LOVE IT. I suppose it's partly due to the culture of gift-giving here, in which case it's nice to have things in little individual packages. Makes sense for things like omiyage (souvenirs) or perhaps the odd, easily-perishable item that might go bad in relatively high (as compared with Denver, anyway) humidity. Box-lunches that benefit from a small self-contained snack also spring to mind. But the over packaging doesn't stop there. Everything comes individually wrapped. Buy a box of cookies? Open it up and you'll find 12 individually wrapped little snacks. Want some tissues? Here, have a box with 5 more boxes inside. How about a box of pens? Inside you'll find 20 pens that come in their own plastic bags. And don't even get me started on how those boxes of pens are themselves coated in plastic shrink-wrap.

As an environmentalist, I certainly have plenty to gripe about with such an gross example of wasteful packaging, strictly on moral grounds. But if I get off my high-horse and speak as a person living here, it's just plain hard to throw anything away. In this culture of over packaging, there are virtually NO TRASH CANS anywhere.

It's kind of a big joke amongst the foreign population, how we all end up carting around loads of garbage in our bags until we find a place to get rid of it. Out in public this usually takes the form of the convenience store, which is one of the only places you can ever find to get rid of your trash.


photo from julie in japan

You may have noticed that those aren't just ordinary trash cans. They're set up for you to sort your unwanted goods, in addition to getting rid of them. This applies equally for public trash cans and disposing of garbage at home, so I'll just focus on what it takes to get rid of the stuff from my apartment.

One of the biggest surprises I had waiting for me when I first moved here was the "garbage list". Which looks like this

Basically, what we have are:
燃えるごみ (moeru gomi), burnable garbage like kitchen waste, tissues, bedding, etc.
燃えないごみ (moenai gomi), non-burnable garbage like broken glass, rubber, non-recyclable plastic and metal (like jar lids), broken plates, etc.
プラ (pura), plastics
PET bottles, aka plastic pop/tea/juice bottles
紙 (kami), paper items like empty ice cream cups, paper bags, and paperboard boxes
瓶 (kame), glass bottles
缶 (kan), aluminum cans/metal
紙パック (kami paku), milk and juice cartons
資源ごみ (shigen gomi), recyclable materials (like all that office paper I've got)

The way you pay for your trash removal is actually a pretty good system, IMO. Instead of paying a monthly fee for however much you want to toss, you pay for the bags you use to put the trash out. Without the proper bag, they won't pick up your garbage. In addition, each household is allotted a certain amount of "trash stickers" to be used for the burnable and non-burnable trash. If, by some aberration of nature, you actually manage to use up all of the stickers they give you, I'm not really sure what happens. I've never even come close to it in my two years here.

Anyway, I was really fortunate in that the girl in my position before me was incredibly organized and left for me a pretty easy system for coping with the "list". I've got boxes under my sink for plastics, PET bottles, and boxboard. The burnable trash goes in the regular trash-can with a lid. In one of my closets I have boxes for aluminum cans/ metal and glass bottles, and a small box for non-burnables. I've only thrown the cans and bottles once or twice, and I've yet to collect enough non-burnable trash to make it worthwhile to bag up and put out. At least before the purge, heh heh heh.

In addition to the trash stickers, everybody gets a schedule for when to put their trash out. Burnables are taken twice a week, and everything else is on kind of a rotating system. It's pretty logical, put the separated trash in the appropriately colored clear-plastic bag, and in the case of burnable or non-burnable trash, a sticker showing your name and address. And if you've put something in there that shouldn't be there, technically somebody can return your trash to you for you to sort out before throwing it away again. Although I've snuck in the occasional junk-mail into the burnable garbage here and there, it's never been returned to me, and I see bags in the trash cans all the time that clearly have not been sorted properly.

All of this is to say, that although I've purged my shelves of all this paper, it still hasn't left my apartment. It's currently sitting in three nicely-loaded bags, waiting to be bundled in twine and taken over to the drop-off place. And there they shall sit for now, for recyclable materials like office paper and milk cartons are only collected once a month; and that day doesn't come again until November 14.

*sigh*

Saturday, October 17, 2009

So long Smacky, hello Bucky

I never even saw it coming. It was like being hit by a speeding truck, that drove off in the night. Every day we had been together; mostly when I was on my way somewhere, but also occasionally while killing time waiting for something. Always there with a pick-me-up, when I was feeling down. Ready to rock when I was in a good mood. And who could forget all those classes spent energizing the kids with holiday jingles and Super Mario?

I'm talking, of course, about my iPod. Smacky.


We'd been together since 2005, sharing many travel adventures and boring commutes, occasionally doing a tv program here and there. Everything was going fine until last Friday, when I disconnected him from my car adapter and put him in my bag. The next time I tried to play him... nothing.

At first, I thought it was just one of those silly "reset" situations. We've had those before, they're not a big deal. But try as I might, no matter how many times I reset him, Smacky refused to turn on. Then I thought it might be the battery, so I hooked him up to my computer for a full night, hoping he would be recognized in the morning. But nothing T_T

It was at this point I realized that at some time on Friday night, while I was wandering around the Takayama Festival eating snacks and talking with former students, Smacky passed silently into the great iPod "beyond".

I looked up on the internet what it would take to get him fixed. We'd been together for 4 years, I figured I at least owed him that much. And then I found to my horror, that if I did send him in for refurbishment, he'd come back with his memory erased. He might not even be the same iPod, I could end up with someone else's former friend. And it would likely cost me 100 bucks at least.

I mulled my options. Send Smacky in? Drive music-free for who-knows-how-long, only to get back an empty shell of my former friend? Or do I go get a new one? I decided my only real option. It was time to let Smacky go.

The next issue was deciding which new one to go with. There's the shuffle, the nano, the classic, and the touch. Not to mention the iPhone, which I was actually kicking myself for turning my nose up at only a few months earlier. At the time I thought, I've got an ipod already. Why would I want one for my phone? Ha ha ha, oh irony.

I already have a shuffle that I received as a gift a few years ago. Satchel, as he's known, doesn't have a lot of memory, but works just fine as my faithful running partner. So that removed the shuffles from the list automatically.

Then we have the nano, which comes with a video display and has more memory than the shuffle. They also come in an array of colors and the new ones can take video. Which is like, who thought of that? "hmmmm, what do people look for in a portable music player? I know! Let's put a video camera in it!" :S

The classic is what I had originally had, except now they come with way more capacity than Smacky, who, at 30GB was apparently a relic model. The new ones come with 160GB. If I'm honest with myself, I never came close to filling the space on Smacky, even with videos. And the few times I watched videos on him it killed the battery, so I didn't do it very often. 160 GB is probably way too much storage for me, esp when it's almost twice as expensive as the nano. And a lot bigger physically too. So I decided the classic was out.

That left the touch, which intrigued me. It's got the touchscreen interface, and wifi capability. You can play games on it and and it's basically an iPhone without the phone part. It's also quite expensive.

In the end, I decided that for me, an iPod is a music player. I don't need it to play games, and I can get internet access through my phone when I'm out and about. I'm probably not going to watch videos on it. For the same amount of storage and half the price, not to mention a fraction of the physical size, the nano was the way to go. And I could pick my favorite color too ^^



Getting an iPod in Japan is the same as getting one anywhere. The only difference is all the documentation that comes with it is in Japanese

Other than that, they're exactly the same as any other model. It's been so long since I even contemplated getting one of these that I was really surprised by the size of it. Compared to the classic, it's tiny!


And it's greeeeeeeeeeen!

So now I face the arduous task of loading the music I want (as opposed to everything in my library) onto it. I'll always remember Smacky, my first portable music player. But I'm looking forward to new awesome adventures with Bucky ^_^

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Cockney Rhyming Slang

This really doesn't have anything to do with life in Japan, but I doubt it would ever have taken place if I didn't live here.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a fellow ALT in Hida, who is originally from England. He was teaching me about the nearly intelligible dialect of Cockney Rhyming Slang. Something which, prior to this conversation, I didn't even realize existed. And I'm still not entirely sure why it does, ha ha ha

ALT
cockney rhyming slang is where you substitute things for words when they rhyme
but not just anything
and i have no idea why
so apples and pears is stairs


Me
apples and pears together are stairs?

ALT
so you say "she fell down the apples and pears"!

Me
ha ha ha
how the heck did apples and pears become stairs?


ALT
i have no idea!
and "midnight kiss" is piss
and a funny one i found the other day is piano is joanna
so in london people with strong accents say piana


Me
well that's romantic

ALT
erm, dunno about romantic

Me
;)

ALT
cockneys aren't really the romantic types

Me
ha ha ha
i dunno


ALT
they are more like scallies

Me
giving someone a nice sweet piss...

ALT
he he he

Me
or do i have that backwards?
go take a midnight kiss?


ALT
lol, the other way round!!!

Me
ha ha ha ha ha

ALT
yeah, to take a midnight kiss

Me
ha ha ha ha
i totally don't get it
but it's making me laugh


ALT
like, "hold me brew, i'm gonna take a midnight kiss"
i have no clue why cockney rhyming slang exists


Me
to confuse other people?

ALT
just geezers with too much time on their hands

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

TY0918 (Melor)

In the US we call them "hurricanes". Some places say "cyclone".

In Japan, these storms are called 台風, tai fuu.

Whatever you want to call it, there's one heading this way, and besides being the first one to make landfall since 2007, it's also supposed to be the most powerful in a decade (according to the AFP).

And it's projected to take a path that runs smack over Gifu prefecture, including Takayama

(from the Japan Meteorological Agency, with a small modification ^^)

The Japan Meteorological Agency is predicting wind speeds of 98 mph near the center, and gusts of 123 mph by the time it reaches us here. This is down from 134 mph gusts when it makes landfall on the southeastern coast of Honshu tonight. No sign of the wind yet, although the rain has been falling here since this afternoon, steadily getting stronger and stronger.

In light of this, the JR Lines will not be running (the trains will stop) and all classes in Takayama elementary and junior high schools are cancelled tomorrow. Meaning the kids don't go to school. Lucky guys.

The teachers however, being dedicated civil servants (including yours truly), are still required to go. Why, exactly, is a little beyond me, but such is life in Japan. At least up here in the mountains of land-locked Gifu prefecture we don't have to worry about storm surges... just lots of rain and wind. Bring on the ponchos and rubber boots!

--Edited 10/08/2009 5pm: well what was supposed to be the biggest storm in a decade turned out to be surprisingly weak. Light rain and a few gusts of wind is all we got here; I think we had more damage from the torrential rains we had in June and July than from the "typoon"! At least I was around to experience the last one, in September 2007 =)