6 ms·

Japan has plenty of trash on steets.

by sznio 11d ago

naishoya 10d ago
So, im going to address this low effert, uninformed post first, but the longer part of this will attempt to be informational to the larger branch under discussion here. TLDR; not really trash in the streets anywhere by any reasonable measurement and nowhere near 'plenty' unless the definition of 'plenty' is 'some, somewhere, sometimes.' & Conversion rates don't matter when discussing minimum wage rates, only the local purchasing power matters. Here's the longer than anyone might expect who doesn't recognize my posts; Trash may sometimes appear in a few places, mostly in larger inner cities with significant international populations. In my town, and even in the larger regional metro areas, just about the only places I see actual litter are where tour buses full of international tourists deposit daily crowds or where a high speed road passes through forested areas without much concurrent traffic and so people feel that it is acceptable to toss drink bottles and food wrappers out the window unseen. The rest is remarkable for the general lack of any trash on the streets. It is a common sight in almost every town and city, early in the mornings, to see any number of people actively sweeping the sidewalk AND street in front of homes or businesses. Some will be washing with a brush and clean water. For nearly the entire country, trash is collected from a designated bird and vermin proof cage or box from every block on most weekdays, on a weekly and monthly rotating schedule, sorted into recyclables: with different days for plastics, paper, small metal, appliances and fabrics, and actual 'trash' which is restricted to burnable foodscraps/paper products which are too soiled for recycling and which do not contain glossy or metallic dyes. If the pickup schedule is inconvenient at your house, or if your volume of recyclables isn't worth spending 35jpy for a clear rash bag [which is how they manage funding the collection: through region specific trash bags of are clear plastic with color coding for which type of waste belongs in them that you may purchase at nearly any grocery or convenience store] there are sorted recycling bins near the main doors of every grocery and convenience store - just drop off on your way in for shopping. My wife and I do frequently collect and recycle litter from two areas, because one of them is the walking gardens around a shrine which we wish to see remain mostly free of cigarette butts, and the other is a roadside forest of beech, black walnut and chestnut trees. We visit there regularly, collecting for some extra variety in our diet the nuts, sansai (wild greens) and edible fungi that grow in the forest. Collecting the trash haul is no small part of our biweekly free time in the late summer and fall. Over this last year, as we have continued working along both sides of a 3km stretch of trees it is remarkable how little new trash is occurring. This seems to match our initial observation that the volume of rubbish was of varying ages and had accumulated over a significant length of time since the last cleanup of this nominally 'public domain' patch of forest. [It is a local land trust with the responsibility of fire prevention and otherwise is a Satoyama designated resource for exactly this kind of community wilderness light impact harvesting - which is why there isn't a designated trash cleanup scheduled but once every 4 to 5 years] Otherwise the amount of 'trash in the streets' is very much limited to inner city and is one of the reasons underlying growing popularity of tightening of immigration regulations. Not saying it doesn't happen in smaller cities, but rather most of Japan generally engages in cleaning up as soon as they notice any trash. The total of loose trash is remarkably lower than anywhere else I have been, and we do travel to other places fairly regularly; including Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia in the last few months. None of the clean corners of those places is anywhere near as clean as the average street I travel through in Japan, and this has been true in my observations during many visits and several periods of residency over the last 32 years. Now, for the concept of working conditions and overtime protections in Japan. One strange bit of the perception about overworking and high cost of living compared to wages in Japan, is that so many of these observations and statistics deal with the slightly more than half of the population crammed into the Tokyo to Kansai wedge of giant, almost contiguous metropolitan urban swath along the east-south coastal corridor. The other half of the population not living in these major cities has a significantly different experience. Work is still hectic, but the revenue to cost of living balance, the total hours expected at work per day or week, and the general approach to work-life balance is quite different. A significant portion of this population engages in some agriculture in addition to holding a regular job, and this is understood to be a necessary part of the local economy. It is not uncommon for a Sendai taxi driver to also farm rice on a small to medium scale. This keeps him busy driving a cab when there would be nothing to do but watch the wind blow across growing rice, and he can schedule time off from the cab managers against the few time sensitive days for harvest, planting, or water flooding/draining that are determined by that seasons specific weather. Otherwise the rest can happen on his 'weekend' which may be Tuesdays-Wednesdays, or some other day of the week as most fellow drivers are in the same situation and they work schedules around each other. The same may be true of a local bank branch manager in Yamagata, or the train station ticket clerk in Morioka, an Akita retail shopkeeper, or Aomori middle-school math teacher. It is remarkable how the high paced, high stress, long hours working demand of inner city Tokyo becomes the view that the whole world adopts as the state of affairs in Japan. It is unsurprising though, over 95% of visitors to Japan ever get more than 30 minutes away from a Shinkansen stop. That's right, less than 5% of all visitors see any of the rest of Japan. It's still possible, today, as a 'hen na pera pera gaijin' going to small towns and meeting random people who have ever actually met or spoken to anyone from anywhere else in the world in their whole life. They are just busy doing what they do, and no one ever shows up to see what it is like. The lives lived in rural Japan would be the envy of the world if they were truly understood. The regularity of the seasons, reliability of daily life, kindness of neighbors, freshness of local farm and wild vegetables, fruit in splendorous variety, the sounds of winter snowfall and light traffic through safe, clean, and orderly streets, are each and all a wondrous marvel. My rural friends' primary small complaints all revolve around the sameness of it all year after year, and I have to smile and tell them that sameness is what they have that is best of all. A long, slow, quiet life without the chaos and fear of unpredictable outcomes, where they have the time to enjoy perfecting whatever craft they pursue, is nothing to complain about. Most of them do actually 'get it' and have not moved to the city because they value it, but to me they say that they are envious of travel and excitement. I think in order to not make me feel like I have missed out by being from there, and partly it's to keep too many from moving out of the city and ruining the quiet. "Its sooo boring here, you'd not find anything to entertain you. Thanks for visiting, but nobody should WANT to move here, we're all too dull." But the regular community festivals and local get-together occasions make the absolute lie of this all; pork soup and mochi-pounding at the local fire-station community center with about a hundred people eating and laughing. Happy kids running around being silly while all the adults sit and chat about the things that made them laugh and are told in a way to make everyone laugh at what fun they've had just this week doing normal things among the field and office work. Time and again I find this to be a piece of the kind of community life that Norman Rockwell was trying to capture in his art, and somehow this is more real, and more pervasive, and more harmonious than any of those scenes. So, circling back to the 'trash in the street' view of Japan. Everyone here who hasn't actually been to Japan, and even those who have; if your view of Japan is equating the big city perspective of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto as representative of the whole country for lifestyle, attitudes, scenery, workplace environments, culture, and habits you have missed the overwhelming rest of the country. Here is a link to a map showing with colored regions which are home to approximately 51% of the population. Compare that the the rest of the map and you can begin to understand the 35x difference in density between Kanazawa (Kawasaki) and Yamagata prefectures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt#/media/File:Major_metropolitan_employment_areas_of_Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt#/media/File...
- naishoya 10d ago
  Now, there is a minimal wage which has been lifted 5% recently to 1092JPY per hour in Yamagata. Something that is important to realize about that wage, before breaking out a calculator and converting to USD for an 'ours is higher' comparison, is the real purchasing power of a weeks wages at minimum earnings. Total tax, pension and healthcare withholding will max at ~17% for minimum wage employees working over 30 hours per week. This withholding amount is matched by the employer separate from wages, which for a full time position nets just over 145k JPY per month. In my town, 2 Bedroom 1 Bath, Dining, Kitchen apartment costs 25k to 40k JPY per month, and a 3Bed 2 Bath house can be rented for about 45 to 50k. That's living space for a couple to a family of four on between 28 to 35% of a single full time minimum wage job, with pension and health insurance. Electricity, LP gas, water and septic (the bill includes both by volume), and two cell phones work out to around a little less than 40k per month total. Add another 40k per month as groceries for two, plus eating out for a couple of ramen shop lunches or curry house dinners every week - a bit high because we each drink way too much of the wonderful 3.8% Hokkaido milk and a couple could still be living comfortably within 90% of that SINGLE full time minimum wage paycheck. If the second person has even 3/4 full time work at minimum wage, that's another 108k JPY every month and the total cost of a normal life is slightly over 51% of 1.75x FTE at minimum wage earnings. It doesn't matter how many USD that equals, because it's not realistic to expect to be able to support a family of two on a single minimum wage job anywhere in the US and it hasn't been that way since at least 1981, and the ~17% withholding rate covers fully comprehensive health coverage and pension without deductibles or surprise out-of-pocket bankruptcy level events. Do some workers living in the busiest and most expensive parts of Tokyo fall victim to social and societal pressures to 'outlast' coworkers by not leaving, even to the extent of clocking out and returning to their desk and appearing to work? Sure. Its unhealthy and performative. They pretend to work, and the company isn't actually paying them for not working. So, yeah, a-hole bosses and brown-nosing coworkers seem to be ubuquitous in every over-corporate environment, but that's not actually 'Normal' for most of the country. I have personal friends who were born and raised in the Tokyo societal realm, and work in quite large and productive roles with immense pressure, but they don't pretend to work, or work off the clock. Large, productive, and efficient businesses don't thrive by pretending to be good at something. My friends do work long hours, but also have specific time off and participate in raising their own children, and take annual family vacations which include skiing in Nagano and Zao, regular weekend trips to zoos and educational amusement, and has spare time to meet us at the Airport or go to an early lunch at the Ramen Museum if given them enough lead time and there isn't a real project constraint that cannot be worked around. So, stressful and busy? Yes. Well compensated and appreciated at work? Yes. Also very much not senior management, nor frontline labor, just a mid-grade logistics professional with good work-life balance and a partner who is a full time parent and manages the houshold budget with clear purpose and effective planning. Another 15 years when we both reach retirement age and decide not to retire because of the facts about ageing populations in Japan, he'll still already be worth a couple of million dollars (US) because of these facts about wages and cost of living. So would I be, if 30 years ago I had taken the minimum wage job on offer and stayed in Japan. But no, I could only see that i would make a bigger hourly wage if I moved and worked in the US. I was pretty stupid in my youth, it's been an expensive lesson to learn. Don't do what I did, if you get offered a minimum wage job in Japan and are qualified to do the work, say yes, be patient with the endless paperwork and interminable waiting, and then show up and be a reliable helper.

Japan has plenty of trash on steets.

by sznio 11d ago

Japan has plenty of trash on steets.

So, im going to address this low effert, uninformed post first, but the longer part of this will attempt to be informational to the larger branch under discussion here. TLDR; not really trash in the streets anywhere by any reasonable measurement and nowhere near 'plenty' unless the definition of 'plenty' is 'some, somewhere, sometimes.' & Conversion rates don't matter when discussing minimum wage rates, only the local purchasing power matters. Here's the longer than anyone might expect who doesn't recognize my posts; Trash may sometimes appear in a few places, mostly in larger inner cities with significant international populations. In my town, and even in the larger regional metro areas, just about the only places I see actual litter are where tour buses full of international tourists deposit daily crowds or where a high speed road passes through forested areas without much concurrent traffic and so people feel that it is acceptable to toss drink bottles and food wrappers out the window unseen. The rest is remarkable for the general lack of any trash on the streets. It is a common sight in almost every town and city, early in the mornings, to see any number of people actively sweeping the sidewalk AND street in front of homes or businesses. Some will be washing with a brush and clean water. For nearly the entire country, trash is collected from a designated bird and vermin proof cage or box from every block on most weekdays, on a weekly and monthly rotating schedule, sorted into recyclables: with different days for plastics, paper, small metal, appliances and fabrics, and actual 'trash' which is restricted to burnable foodscraps/paper products which are too soiled for recycling and which do not contain glossy or metallic dyes. If the pickup schedule is inconvenient at your house, or if your volume of recyclables isn't worth spending 35jpy for a clear rash bag [which is how they manage funding the collection: through region specific trash bags of are clear plastic with color coding for which type of waste belongs in them that you may purchase at nearly any grocery or convenience store] there are sorted recycling bins near the main doors of every grocery and convenience store - just drop off on your way in for shopping. My wife and I do frequently collect and recycle litter from two areas, because one of them is the walking gardens around a shrine which we wish to see remain mostly free of cigarette butts, and the other is a roadside forest of beech, black walnut and chestnut trees. We visit there regularly, collecting for some extra variety in our diet the nuts, sansai (wild greens) and edible fungi that grow in the forest. Collecting the trash haul is no small part of our biweekly free time in the late summer and fall. Over this last year, as we have continued working along both sides of a 3km stretch of trees it is remarkable how little new trash is occurring. This seems to match our initial observation that the volume of rubbish was of varying ages and had accumulated over a significant length of time since the last cleanup of this nominally 'public domain' patch of forest. [It is a local land trust with the responsibility of fire prevention and otherwise is a Satoyama designated resource for exactly this kind of community wilderness light impact harvesting - which is why there isn't a designated trash cleanup scheduled but once every 4 to 5 years] Otherwise the amount of 'trash in the streets' is very much limited to inner city and is one of the reasons underlying growing popularity of tightening of immigration regulations. Not saying it doesn't happen in smaller cities, but rather most of Japan generally engages in cleaning up as soon as they notice any trash. The total of loose trash is remarkably lower than anywhere else I have been, and we do travel to other places fairly regularly; including Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia in the last few months. None of the clean corners of those places is anywhere near as clean as the average street I travel through in Japan, and this has been true in my observations during many visits and several periods of residency over the last 32 years. Now, for the concept of working conditions and overtime protections in Japan. One strange bit of the perception about overworking and high cost of living compared to wages in Japan, is that so many of these observations and statistics deal with the slightly more than half of the population crammed into the Tokyo to Kansai wedge of giant, almost contiguous metropolitan urban swath along the east-south coastal corridor. The other half of the population not living in these major cities has a significantly different experience. Work is still hectic, but the revenue to cost of living balance, the total hours expected at work per day or week, and the general approach to work-life balance is quite different. A significant portion of this population engages in some agriculture in addition to holding a regular job, and this is understood to be a necessary part of the local economy. It is not uncommon for a Sendai taxi driver to also farm rice on a small to medium scale. This keeps him busy driving a cab when there would be nothing to do but watch the wind blow across growing rice, and he can schedule time off from the cab managers against the few time sensitive days for harvest, planting, or water flooding/draining that are determined by that seasons specific weather. Otherwise the rest can happen on his 'weekend' which may be Tuesdays-Wednesdays, or some other day of the week as most fellow drivers are in the same situation and they work schedules around each other. The same may be true of a local bank branch manager in Yamagata, or the train station ticket clerk in Morioka, an Akita retail shopkeeper, or Aomori middle-school math teacher. It is remarkable how the high paced, high stress, long hours working demand of inner city Tokyo becomes the view that the whole world adopts as the state of affairs in Japan. It is unsurprising though, over 95% of visitors to Japan ever get more than 30 minutes away from a Shinkansen stop. That's right, less than 5% of all visitors see any of the rest of Japan. It's still possible, today, as a 'hen na pera pera gaijin' going to small towns and meeting random people who have ever actually met or spoken to anyone from anywhere else in the world in their whole life. They are just busy doing what they do, and no one ever shows up to see what it is like. The lives lived in rural Japan would be the envy of the world if they were truly understood. The regularity of the seasons, reliability of daily life, kindness of neighbors, freshness of local farm and wild vegetables, fruit in splendorous variety, the sounds of winter snowfall and light traffic through safe, clean, and orderly streets, are each and all a wondrous marvel. My rural friends' primary small complaints all revolve around the sameness of it all year after year, and I have to smile and tell them that sameness is what they have that is best of all. A long, slow, quiet life without the chaos and fear of unpredictable outcomes, where they have the time to enjoy perfecting whatever craft they pursue, is nothing to complain about. Most of them do actually 'get it' and have not moved to the city because they value it, but to me they say that they are envious of travel and excitement. I think in order to not make me feel like I have missed out by being from there, and partly it's to keep too many from moving out of the city and ruining the quiet. "Its sooo boring here, you'd not find anything to entertain you. Thanks for visiting, but nobody should WANT to move here, we're all too dull." But the regular community festivals and local get-together occasions make the absolute lie of this all; pork soup and mochi-pounding at the local fire-station community center with about a hundred people eating and laughing. Happy kids running around being silly while all the adults sit and chat about the things that made them laugh and are told in a way to make everyone laugh at what fun they've had just this week doing normal things among the field and office work. Time and again I find this to be a piece of the kind of community life that Norman Rockwell was trying to capture in his art, and somehow this is more real, and more pervasive, and more harmonious than any of those scenes. So, circling back to the 'trash in the street' view of Japan. Everyone here who hasn't actually been to Japan, and even those who have; if your view of Japan is equating the big city perspective of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto as representative of the whole country for lifestyle, attitudes, scenery, workplace environments, culture, and habits you have missed the overwhelming rest of the country. Here is a link to a map showing with colored regions which are home to approximately 51% of the population. Compare that the the rest of the map and you can begin to understand the 35x difference in density between Kanazawa (Kawasaki) and Yamagata prefectures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt#/media/File:Major_metropolitan_employment_areas_of_Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt#/media/File...

naishoya 10d ago
Now, there is a minimal wage which has been lifted 5% recently to 1092JPY per hour in Yamagata. Something that is important to realize about that wage, before breaking out a calculator and converting to USD for an 'ours is higher' comparison, is the real purchasing power of a weeks wages at minimum earnings. Total tax, pension and healthcare withholding will max at ~17% for minimum wage employees working over 30 hours per week. This withholding amount is matched by the employer separate from wages, which for a full time position nets just over 145k JPY per month. In my town, 2 Bedroom 1 Bath, Dining, Kitchen apartment costs 25k to 40k JPY per month, and a 3Bed 2 Bath house can be rented for about 45 to 50k. That's living space for a couple to a family of four on between 28 to 35% of a single full time minimum wage job, with pension and health insurance. Electricity, LP gas, water and septic (the bill includes both by volume), and two cell phones work out to around a little less than 40k per month total. Add another 40k per month as groceries for two, plus eating out for a couple of ramen shop lunches or curry house dinners every week - a bit high because we each drink way too much of the wonderful 3.8% Hokkaido milk and a couple could still be living comfortably within 90% of that SINGLE full time minimum wage paycheck. If the second person has even 3/4 full time work at minimum wage, that's another 108k JPY every month and the total cost of a normal life is slightly over 51% of 1.75x FTE at minimum wage earnings. It doesn't matter how many USD that equals, because it's not realistic to expect to be able to support a family of two on a single minimum wage job anywhere in the US and it hasn't been that way since at least 1981, and the ~17% withholding rate covers fully comprehensive health coverage and pension without deductibles or surprise out-of-pocket bankruptcy level events. Do some workers living in the busiest and most expensive parts of Tokyo fall victim to social and societal pressures to 'outlast' coworkers by not leaving, even to the extent of clocking out and returning to their desk and appearing to work? Sure. Its unhealthy and performative. They pretend to work, and the company isn't actually paying them for not working. So, yeah, a-hole bosses and brown-nosing coworkers seem to be ubuquitous in every over-corporate environment, but that's not actually 'Normal' for most of the country. I have personal friends who were born and raised in the Tokyo societal realm, and work in quite large and productive roles with immense pressure, but they don't pretend to work, or work off the clock. Large, productive, and efficient businesses don't thrive by pretending to be good at something. My friends do work long hours, but also have specific time off and participate in raising their own children, and take annual family vacations which include skiing in Nagano and Zao, regular weekend trips to zoos and educational amusement, and has spare time to meet us at the Airport or go to an early lunch at the Ramen Museum if given them enough lead time and there isn't a real project constraint that cannot be worked around. So, stressful and busy? Yes. Well compensated and appreciated at work? Yes. Also very much not senior management, nor frontline labor, just a mid-grade logistics professional with good work-life balance and a partner who is a full time parent and manages the houshold budget with clear purpose and effective planning. Another 15 years when we both reach retirement age and decide not to retire because of the facts about ageing populations in Japan, he'll still already be worth a couple of million dollars (US) because of these facts about wages and cost of living. So would I be, if 30 years ago I had taken the minimum wage job on offer and stayed in Japan. But no, I could only see that i would make a bigger hourly wage if I moved and worked in the US. I was pretty stupid in my youth, it's been an expensive lesson to learn. Don't do what I did, if you get offered a minimum wage job in Japan and are qualified to do the work, say yes, be patient with the endless paperwork and interminable waiting, and then show up and be a reliable helper.