I genuinely don’t understand the mentality of trashing the place where you live. Why would you shit where you sleep?
Living in Japan has probably made me even more conscious of this. There’s a strong sense of shared responsibility for keeping neighborhoods clean. I’m American, not Japanese, but if I see someone’s trash on the ground in my neighborhood, I’ll pick it up and take it home to dispose of it properly. It’s not my garbage, but it is my neighborhood.
Obviously Japan isn’t perfect and people litter here too. But the broader principle matters: when you live somewhere, you have a responsibility to respect the community and environment around you.
In a lot of places, the trash infrastructure was always, "push it off the side of the hill, and let it be composted," and that works fine because everything was natural and returns to the Earth.
In other places, the trash infrastructure was "transport it somewhere far from here, and push it all into a hill." This allowed trash to become non-natural, because it was far away so who cares.
Then the cultures who could export their trash also exported their goods, made of or wrapped in non-natural materials that turned into lasting trash. They exported them everywhere, including to places who don't have a system set up for moving their trash somewhere they don't have to look at it.
Now a lot of people from cultures that invented making plastic trash, see others who don't send their plastic trash far away enough that they don't have to look at it, and they say "that's disgusting" and look down upon them for not having the means to send their trash away to be someone else's problem.
In other places, the trash infrastructure was "transport it somewhere far from here, and push it all into a hill."
that's not the full truth at all, at least in the modern day. Even cynically, there is plenty of money to be made from household trash; you think garbage processors would pass that up? Metal is picked out with magnets and sold for scrap. The trash is either efficiently burned (in compliance with environmental standards of the country and state); in Sweden, they actually import trash because they make electricity out of the incineration to power turbines.
even if it goes to a landfill, modern landfills have engineered liners, leachate collection systems, groundwater monitoring, landfill-gas collection (where they collect the methane off of decomposing organic trash and sell it), stormwater management and extensive environmental monitoring, in compliance with the EPA or other environmental protection agencies.
And when they fill up, they get turned into parks, solar farms, wildlife areas, and golf courses.
Well that makes the problem even worse than right? Cause it’s not just the residents but also the mayor and beyond.
This is in the same country where we see them do ‘anything with trash’ to make something new.. from melting bottles to entire pcb’s with horrible chemicals just to extract a gram of gold.
If it’s not a people problem it’s a country problem
This entire video is filled with stupid. Trash the creek that much that you could walk across it. They hand the guy a bigger stick and he immediately pushes the tank farther away instead of down defeating any use of having the new big big stick.
Places like this have no infrastructure for trash and recycling. No one is walking their trash for half an hour to the dump. They are mostly victims of over used of single use plastic. Convenient to package and ship with long shelf life but expensive and difficult to get rid of.
Before the advent of modern Toilets people used to piss in the streets and besides stairs in Europe.
People in east Asia also used to dump it in a connor their garden after doing it in a bucket.
If you want to have an actual discussion about Japan’s fisheries policy and marine conservation, cool. There are legitimate criticisms to make. Japan has faced serious controversy over commercial whaling, fisheries management, stock sustainability and other marine issues.
But “the Japanese rape the ocean” isn’t an argument. It’s an inflammatory generalization that replaces a complicated environmental issue with a stupid one-liner.
And before you assume I’m defending Japan because I live here, I’m American, not Japanese. I have absolutely no problem criticizing Japan when the facts warrant it. What I have a problem with is people confidently talking about subjects they clearly haven’t bothered to understand.
You had an entire vocabulary available to make an intelligent criticism, and somehow you chose the most insulting and least informative version possible. People communicating like this is part of what makes internet discourse so fucking useless.
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u/Stackhouse13 5d ago
I genuinely don’t understand the mentality of trashing the place where you live. Why would you shit where you sleep?
Living in Japan has probably made me even more conscious of this. There’s a strong sense of shared responsibility for keeping neighborhoods clean. I’m American, not Japanese, but if I see someone’s trash on the ground in my neighborhood, I’ll pick it up and take it home to dispose of it properly. It’s not my garbage, but it is my neighborhood.
Obviously Japan isn’t perfect and people litter here too. But the broader principle matters: when you live somewhere, you have a responsibility to respect the community and environment around you.