Japan is famous for its spotless streets. So why are public rubbish bins so hard to find?
Getty ImagesFrom a deadly 1995 attack to deeply ingrained social norms, the story of Japan's scarce rubbish bins is more complicated than it first appears.
Spend a day sightseeing in Tokyo and you may find yourself carrying an empty coffee cup, your 7-11 egg sando wrapper and a growing sense of confusion. Japan is renowned for prizing cleanliness – so why is there nowhere to throw anything away?
It's a frustration familiar to visitors, and one that has spawned countlesssocial mediavideos of bewildered tourists hunting the spotless streets for a rubbish bin.
But the answer is more complicated than it first appears.
"It is a complex mix of historical developments… economic phenomena, political events and their variegated effects on how people decide to act," says Eiko Maruko Siniawer, history professor at Williams College and author of Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan.
Japan wasn't always a bin-less nation. Siniawer points to March 1995 as a major turning point in the nation's bin culture – when members of the Aum Shinrikyō cult released sarin gas on three Tokyo Metro lines during the morning rush hour, killing 14 and injuring thousands. In the aftermath, authorities sealed or removed rubbish bins as a terrorism-prevention measure.
Subsequent terrorist attacks around the world, including 9/11 in the US, helped ensure those measures stuck. But three decades later, security alone doesn't explain why so few bins have returned – or why Japan remains so remarkably litter-free.
Getty ImagesCost and practicality are part of the answer. Since the 2000s, some municipalities have deliberately reduced street bins, says Aya Yoshida of Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies, to encourage people to take their rubbish home.
"In Kyoto, for example, the number of street bins was cut by more than half […] from 2011, after problems such as household waste being deposited in them and litter accumulating around them increased the costs of maintaining and managing those bins," Yoshida adds.
So why isn't there more litter on the streets? Yoshida cautions against attributing Japan's cleanliness to some uniquely Japanese sense of tidiness. Clean streets, she stresses, are also the result of years of deliberate policy. "For decades, municipalities have invested in anti-littering campaigns, public education, street cleaning and environmental design measures intended to discourage littering," she says.
But social norms matter too, she says. One is meiwaku o kakenai – the idea of avoiding causing inconvenience to others. Everyday habits also play a part: eating on the go is relatively uncommon, so people tend to generate less rubbish while they're out.
"Thinking about my own daily living patterns, I'm not sure how much trash is generated in transit, from home to work and back," Siniawer says. "There's also less opportunity to generate trash in transit… since it's unusual to eat while walking or riding on a train in Japan."
Visitors, of course, experience the city differently. They spend long days sightseeing, buying drinks and convenience store snacks – and are far more likely to find themselves carrying rubbish around with nowhere obvious to put it.
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The lack of readily available bins can be both confusing and frustrating for tourists at first, says Japan-based tour guide Junko Yokoo. But many quickly adapt. "At first, my guests often mourn the lack of available trash bins, but they also enjoy seeing no trash on the streets and learn to embrace a 'when in Tokyo' mentality," she says.
Getty ImagesDespite what visitors might think, rubbish bins haven't disappeared entirely – you just have to know where to find them, adds Siniawer. "Train stations still have them, often in the form of transparent receptacles positioned near ticket gates where they can be monitored by staff or security cameras.
And just this month, Tokyo's Shinjuku Station began piloting perhaps the most Japanese solution of all: roaming rubbish-bin robots that travel around collecting litter.
Until they become the norm, visitors may simply have to do what Tokyoites have long done: hang on to their rubbish until they find somewhere to put it.
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