
Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is - pseudolus
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191006-what-japan-can-teach-us-about-cleanliness
======
multani
I was cycling in Japan for about 2 weeks, just a few weeks ago. I was also
impressed in most places by how clean it was, not only in the cities, but more
generally speaking about everywhere.

At some point though, I was cycling along the coast of Mie then Wakayama
prefectures, and although the scenery and roads were clean, I had a glance
just behind the ramp walk, and realized that behind the trees, in the bush
next to the road were hundreds of garbage bags, litter of all sort, really
anything, just lying below. There was such a contrast from what my eyes were
seeing until, I was shocked.

In another town several kilometres after (I forgot which place exactly, must
have been while cycling up towards Wakayama city), I passed next to a big
commercial area on my right. On my left there was a small patch of forest then
the sea and again, that forest contained many many plastic bags, full but
neatly tied up, every couple of meters or so, for several hundreds of meters.

I originally thought the first thrashes I saw along the road in the country
side where "mistakes", like things flying off the window or pushed by the wind
from another place (although there was a lot of garbage anyway). But when I
saw these tied up plastic bags, they weren't there by chance, really people
throw these bags away on the forest right here. That made me a bit sad,
especially since it broke the original image I got.

(And I haven't spoke about the beaches and seafront all along that peninsula;
I wouldn't walk bare foot there).

Then I came home in Switzerland, looked up the small water stream close to my
place, and realized it wasn't as neat as one can see at first glance... So I
should probably start with that before criticising other countries _sigh_

~~~
brookside
Interested in the cycling part of this. Any routes you recommend?

I did the short Shimanami Kaido over the inland sea which was, of course,
wonderful.

~~~
carty76ers
Follow-up question: did you camp along the route?

~~~
multani
I did 6 times but weather was a bit crap and many places were already closed
(and I _really_ needed that shower at the end of the day :p). On the other
end, I was practically alone most of the time (I shared a barbecue under a
tarp under the rain with a Japanese guy on my last camping day) and most of
the camp sites were just by the sea, which was pretty cool.

------
Reason077
Sadly, this is the opposite of the UK cultural attitude. Kids here learn that
cleaning up is someone else’s responsibility. Littering becomes a habit from
an early age.

Even compared to Americans, we are terrible litterers. You can see this in
people’s behaviours in fast food restaurants: in the US (as in many other
countries), customers will bin their food wrappers and return their tray when
they leave. Even groups of kids will typically do this: it’s just habit. In
the UK, typical customers will just leave their mess at the table when they
leave. Cleaning is someone else’s job.

~~~
Aperocky
Whoa, that sucks. Out of curiosity, do people in UK tip? In the states, if
there's no tip, then it is expected for the customer to clean up after
themselves.

~~~
lol768
>Out of curiosity, do people in UK tip?

Not in a fast-food restaurant, no.

You'll often see folks in cafés help out and return their trays, but it's not
a guarantee - and in some establishments it's not even possible for you as a
customer to do this. At the end of the day, you're paying to sit down - and
clearing your table afterwards is priced into the food offer.

Fast food is a bit more of a grey area, since there's not necessarily table
service. I'd throw away my rubbish at e.g. Burger King - there's usually bins
provided for this purpose.

~~~
tom_
I tidy up or not based on whether there's table service. No table service = I
do it myself, table service = it's somebody else's problem. I don't think
anybody ever taught me this explicitly - it's just something I must have
picked up, I suppose?

I don't think it's really all that outrageous to just leave the detritus on
the table in either case. But when there's no table service, the tables won't
be getting cleared so regularly, so it can make things inconvenient for the
other patrons.

~~~
shard
There area a lot of edge cases with this scenario. In some fast food
restaurants (such as certain Burger King locations), you will get a number and
the employees will bring the food to you, so there is a minimal form of table
service. Also, the history of the country matters as well. In China, where
there is no tipping culture, but fast food started out as fancy expensive
foreign food not too long ago, the employees are expected to clean up, even as
prices are now lower relatively compared with moderately expensive
restaurants. On the other hand, in Korea, where there also is no tipping
culture, fast food is now cheaper food, and you clean up after yourself.

------
jaynetics
The cleanliness is impressive, but what impressed me even more was the
efficiency.

One morning in Tokyo, I saw construction workers starting to dig up a street.
It was a large operation, they were exposing some massive pipes, and there
were a few policemen, politely pointing pedestrians to a way around the site.

In the evening I went the same way again, to see how far they had gotten with
the digging. However, there was no hole anymore. They were already done, and
the street looked like new, with hardly a trace of what had happened.

I felt kinda bad about my place (Germany), where this would have taken at
least a week.

~~~
mrmonkeyman
You don't know if it was:

A) just an inspection B) regulated to the same degree as in Germany (i.e.
digging a hole and covering it up is easy if don't have rules) C) succesful D)
done properly

~~~
scarejunba
Somehow, I suspect B, C, and D are spurious concerns.

------
fiblye
Undiluted orientalism.

I was in Osaka this weekend and litter is everywhere. By far one of the
dirtiest major cities I’ve seen in East Asia. In the city I live in in Japan,
the rice fields are full of coffee cans, plastic bottles, and bento packaging
thrown out from cars. Streets are covered in cigarette butts and somehow I see
natto containers in the middle of nowhere. Going hiking, I see tea bottles and
plastic bags from convenience stores all over the damn place.

Most parts of Tokyo and cities with tourism are generally clean because there
are heavy cleanup operations. People are still littering just like everywhere
else.

> Invisible dirt – germs and bacteria – are another source of concern. When
> people catch colds or flu, they wear surgical masks to avoid infecting other
> people.

But you’ll never catch people washing their hands and grandpas always pull
down their mask to cough so as to not dirty it. I caught a news program during
flu season last year telling people how to avoid the flu. Their
recommendations? Keep your stomach wrapped and extra warm, and drink green tea
since it cures influenza.

~~~
tlear
I live in Japan as well.

Hiking.. have you actually hiked anywhere in else in the world? Most places
you can fill a garbage bag in an hour just walking on a trail. Took my
climbing friends from Canada on a long Hike in Kita Alps, they brought a
garbage bag as they always do to gather other peoples trash. We managed to
find 2 empty water bottles in 3 days having covered close to 50km. See the
campsites near huts after people leave in the morning they are EMPTY.

Try camping at a car camp sites.. now compare that to the clusterfuck of
drunks, blaring music, trash, puke piss, shit that you get in NA. Went to
Ishikawa for a week this summer camped by the sea, huge camp site tons of
people actually very nice. Same thing in US? God fucking help you. This is why
they actually don’t have assigned lots for tents, in Canada people would get
killed every long weekend if anyone was dumb to try that(car camping)

Of course there is garbage in cities in some places but compared to vast
majority of the world it is clean. They actually clean public toilets.. it is
a miracle.

~~~
joeberon
Just want to say I’ve hiked significantly across the UK and there is extremely
little litter

~~~
geden
Agreed. There's very little litter in the UK countryside because
(generalising) the people who litter don't go there and the people who do are
included to pick it up.

British towns and cities aren't great, embarrassingly bad compared to the
Japanese cities I've been to.

I spent a weekend in Lisbon recently and was fairly shocked at how bad the
litter / rubbish was. The worst I've seen in Europe. Warm climate made it
smelly too.

------
davidmurdoch
American (US) in Tokyo for the first time here. About an hour ago (10:30 pm
here) I saw two men with a bucket and washcloth scrubbing the floor right next
to Shibuya Crossing ("the busiest crosswalk on the world"). Moments before
that a man was sweeping a walkway between passer-bys). The clothing store
withers swept each changing room in between guests. Though a block away was
the smoking area, littered with thousands of cigarette butts (not sure what
conclusion to draw about smokers).

I was in Osaka earlier in the week, and Kyoto after that. And these cities
were also quite clean and orderly, with Osaka being the most orderly (and much
more relaxed and slow paced, which makes order easier).

One of my favorite parts of Japan's cleanliness is their cars. They are all
sparkling. Even the delivery trucks are shiny and splatter free! The
gas/petrol station near me had at least two attendeds at each car, one to
pump, and the other to clean the car's windows and paint!

Another fascinating thing is how escalators have two lanes, one for walking
and one for standing. Why doesn't everyone so this?! It's so perfect!

Others in this thread don't speak too highly of Osaka, but it was definitely
the most orderly and trash free of the three cities I've visited. Of course,
these cities are quite huge, compared to cities in the US, so perhaps these
conversations should be more fine grained, generalizing by prefecture rather
than city.

I've found that I've been lining my things up neatly, and organizing my
clothes and toiletries here in my in my hotel. It's been inspiring to see all
the order here.

~~~
dmoy
> Another fascinating thing is how escalators have two lanes, one for walking
> and one for standing. Why doesn't everyone so this?! It's so perfect!

Turns out, strangely, that it actually reduces throughput compared to just
having everyone stand. So not exactly perfect I guess.

But yea I agree in the general matter. When my MIL (a master organizer)
visited Japan she thought that was great.

~~~
dilap
> Turns out, strangely, that it actually reduces throughput compared to just
> having everyone stand

Wait, what? How can this be true?

Imagine an escalator w/ both lanes filled with people just standing. Now
imagine the left lane starts walking: clearly, higher throughput.

Now, maybe you're imagining a scenario where people don't want to walk. Now
everyone stands on the right, and the left lane is completely empty. OK, now
we've reduced throughput by half compared to "everyone standing".

So as we consider moving between the extremes of "no walkers" and "walker
saturation", there will be some break-even point of throughput. And beyond
that having a walking lane will be more efficient.

(Also, besides raw throughput, having a walking lane gives you a better
"fastest possible traversal time", which is also valuable, for people in a
hurry.)

~~~
jdkram
Transport for London experimented with this, and found higher overall
throughput during rush hour with two standing lanes:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/it-is-faster-
to-s...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/it-is-faster-to-stand-on-
the-escalator-rather-than-walk-6-month-london-tube-study-finds-a7616871.html)

> Standing-only escalators had a "throughput" of up to 151 passengers per
> minute, while an escalator where commuters were still allowed to walk saw
> around 115.

Your thought experiment's completely right, but in real world circumstances,
once an escalator is above a certain height, people rarely use the walking
lane:

> But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on
> machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only
> 40% would even contemplate it [walking up]. By encouraging their preference,
> TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and
> creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down.

(from [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/16/the-tube-
at-...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/16/the-tube-at-a-
standstill-why-tfl-stopped-people-walking-up-the-escalators) , which has a
great graphic showing the two systems)

~~~
wst_
Transport for London should politely refrain from any statements like that, I
believe. They hardly can allow people to enter the platform because there's no
space to fit the crowd. There's sea of heads almost every morning in front of
most popular stations' gates. Not because they have a gates issue, or any
other unusual problem - they are just regulating flow that way. So, I'd kindly
ask them start modernizing platforms to allow more throughput in the first
place. Then let them experiment and play with statistics, by all means.

------
pcr910303
Well, as a Korean, I think that this is due to the difference of importance of
how other people think me. I've heard that the western world is very
individualistic, and people in general don't care much about how other people
acts.

In Korea (and AFAIK Japan too), people very care of what other people think
about them. They consider the consequences of every action carefully. One of
the results is that people generally don't litter in front of other people,
and that makes the city clean. The places without much people, they are
dirtier than others because there aren't other people around them.

~~~
munmaek
Having lived in 세종시, and Seoul, I strongly disagree with your statement.

Sejong is a brand new city, made in 2014, yet there was litter everywhere,
especially right near bus stops. I distinctly recall seeing empty coffee cups
tossed in the planters/hedges nearby.

There were almost zero trash cans so what do you expect. The bathrooms didn’t
have tissue or anything either, you had to go to one of the nearby stores or
cafes and get some.

Seoul has plenty of dirty areas just like any other enormous city.

People litter everywhere. Some Japanese people may be more conscious about not
littering, but so are some Americans! This article reeks of orientalism.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Japan has a lack of trash cans also. The idea is to get people to think about
their waste and carry it home. It goes hand in hand with their hyper recycling
culture, which I could never really figure out what bin to put stuff in on my
last visit.

~~~
james_s_tayler
The idea is they got freaked out after the 1995 sarin gas attack and in a
knee-jerk reaction took away all the rubbish bins.

------
bonestamp2
Because people clean it constantly. I still find it amazing how many people I
see cleaning when I'm in Tokyo. I was in a store mid-morning and a man was
vacuuming. I walked by again in the afternoon and I noticed he was vacuuming
again. In the west, that happens once/day after the store closes. There it was
continuous. But nothing blew my mind more than when I was on a dirt walking
trail and there was a man sweeping twigs and leaves off the trail.

As much as that surprised me, it also kind of didn't because there are people
working everywhere on everything all the time. The number of concrete mixers
driving around was amazing. Infrastructure is never finished and always seems
to be well funded. I feel kind of embarrassed when I see Japanese people
visiting my city, like they've come to some kind of pioneer town with our
litter everywhere, far too many cars for the available roads and with our
laughably inadequate public transit infrastructure.

------
chvid
As a Dane travelling abouts I have been stuck how clean the following three
countries seemed compared to my home country: Australia, Singapore, and Japan.

~~~
hannob
As a German I can assure you Denmark is far above the average in Europe in
public space cleanliness :-)

~~~
PopeDotNinja
As a San Francisco resident, I can say almost any major Western city is
cleaner. SF is filthy, at least in the downtown areas. Every sidewalk needs a
good power washing and there's poop everywhere.

~~~
kjs3
Yeah...I don't much bat an eye anymore as often as I've seen someone urinating
on the side of a building in a US city, but it's only SF where I regularly see
someone cop a squat and take a dump on the ground. Just lucky, I guess...

------
jessriedel
These sort of articles about Japanese cleanliness and homelessness are
intellectually dishonest if you don't mention massive factors like the fact
that Japan eschewed the deinstitutionalization process that most wealthy
countries went through toward the end of the 20th century

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation)

and as a result, they have _four times_ the rate of involuntarily locking
people up for mental illness as the average:

> For the last 40 years mental health care has shifted from hospital-based
> settings to community-based ones in most countries. As a result the number
> of psychiatric care beds has fallen considerably internationally (Glasby &
> Tew, 2015:106). More and more people with mental disorders are living and
> being cared for in the community. In contrast, Japan still has a very high
> ratio of psychiatric care beds per capita among member countries of the
> Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with 269 beds
> per 100,000 population compared to the average of 68 (OECD, 2014:11).

[http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S...](http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0037-80542016000400002)

~~~
ajhurliman
This implies that the main cause of trash is homelessness. Although
homelessness probably causes an increase of trash, I think it's clear that a
culture of littering also causes trash, which is clearly not present in Japan.

Bringing in the subject of homelessness seems tangential to the topic at hand.

~~~
jessriedel
It certainly doesn't imply that this is the main cause, it suggests that it's
an important cause (say, > 10%) that has to be acknowledged in a 10k word
article. I also think dwelling on a "culture of littering" is much vaguer and
less likely to make falsifiable predictions.

------
pjdemers
There are street cleaners in Japan. I used to visit Tokyo often and I would go
running just before dawn. I saw plenty of people (usually elderly) collecting
trash and sweeping up.

~~~
kylorhall
A lot of shop and home owners clean the street infront of their land. After a
typhoon recently I saw what I assumed was the manager of the Louis Vuitton (or
similar) store sweeping the front of the shop as a ton of branches had fallen
(probably took him 30 minutes or more, it's a very wide sidewalk).

------
DavidVoid
I think it's worth noting that all of Japan isn't as clean as many of the
cities are. A lot of people's homes are still rather dusty and when I visited
in 2012 the outskirts of Osaka and the countryside looked pretty similar to
Europe in terms of how much trash there was in the ditches next to the road.

The cities were noticeably cleaner than Swedish cities though, a lot fewer
chewing gums and cigarette butts from what I remember.

------
spinach
I lived for a year and a half in Hyogo-ken, Japan during uni, mostly with a
host family so I didn't criss-cross the country or anything but one of the
grossest washrooms I have ever been in was in Kobe near the train station. It
was like built into the wall and was just absolutely disgusting with no sink
or anything. And I lived in China for a half a year and saw some pretty nasty
toilets, but nothing as gross as that. Also, pretty much all combini washrooms
are nasty too... But yeah, on the whole Japan appears cleaner - they learn to
clean in school since they take turns being on duty for it and have to clean
their own stuff, not just in high-school either. I joined the tea ceremony
club at my uni which took place in this little traditional style house behind
the school and once a week I was on duty in the morning to scrub the tatami. I
think other countries should take that lesson and build in cleaning duties.

~~~
wst_
And it's not only kids. Grown-ups are supposed to do it at work, too. When
casually I suggested in my office, London, that we should swipe our desks
weekly people laughed at the idea, others were surprised and upset. It's not
their job, isn't it?

------
julienfr112
Most first-time visitor to Paris are struck by how dirty the city is.

~~~
joezydeco
This is a documented condition, especially among Japanese travellers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome)

------
RickJWagner
I really admire the cleanliness, I wish the US had more of this. (It should
stop short of the face masks, though. That's a step too far for me.)

~~~
protomyth
I don't know, during flu season I wish the folks who won't stay home would
wear some masks. They don't always guess right with the flu shot.

------
danielfoster
On a trip to Japan last year I posed a similar question to a friend-- why
restrooms so much cleaner in Japan? I'm constantly amazed at how few many in
the United States don't flush the toilet in public bathrooms.

My friend concluded that much of it had to do with collectivism vs
individualism. Either way I think Americans need to improve their bathroom
etiquette.

------
flavmartins
I've been to Japan two times in the last year and I was shocked at this too.

It's interesting that years back there was a man with mental health issues who
carried out attacks by putting chemicals in garbage cans in public places.
After this Japan got rid of garbage cans in public. Most of them, at least.

You walk downtown Tokyo and there are no garbage cans and no garbage anywhere.
Every once in a while you come across a small convenience store with a very
small can inside or every 10 or so vending machines will have a small bin for
bottles or cans. But for the most part Japan is EXTREMELY clean. The city can
be old, but it's all still clean.

Go to Shibuya, the famous crossing with thousands of people. Show up there in
the morning before rush hour and you'll see very few people, and the streets
are all clean. No garbage anywhere.

~~~
rootsudo
Now that's a lie - go to shibuya around 5am right when the trains open, right
at the crossing and look at Shibuya-Gai.

There's your trash.

------
dwd
The only time I ever really noticed litter in Japan was in Ueno Park during
Sakura.

There's a good chance it was tourists as they had brought in skip bins that
were all overflowing to the point where the skip was sitting in a mound of
rubbish.

Seems not having bins in public places cuts down littering as there is no
expectation that you can dump your rubbish and someone else will deal with it.
A similar thing happened in Brisbane when they removed all the public bins for
the G20. The few remaining bins were all overflowing with litter everywhere or
people dumped rubbish where they used to be.

------
brunoqc
> You stop blowing your nose in public

Is it to stop germs from spraying in the air or is it more a polite thing? Or
maybe to avoid having to carry the soiled tissue.

Do they hide in an alley to do it?

------
tasty_freeze
The thing that struck me when visiting there (Kyoto mainly) was not only the
general cleanliness, but that there were semi-delicate public displays and
works of art that were not defaced/demolished. Eg, some city street sculpture
that if was in the US would probably not last a weekend before some kid or
drunk thought it would be clever to knock it over.

------
vjba
This is a similar situation in Austria too. Well... Vienna to be precise as it
was the only place I visited there.

------
martin_henk
Because everybody does their 5cents here... not 50dollars or 5 dollars. Just
THEIR 5cents

------
hollsted-ifbit
my first time in DF mexico visiting palacio de las bellas artes! There's a
huge park next to it and I remember seeing nothing but trash all around it
like a maze :(

------
the_resistence
it's a beautiful country and people. Others have so much to learn from it
about how to be civilized.

------
h1d
Japan is on declining population and when it chokes enough to bring people
from all over the world, things might change.

------
choonway
Q:Why is Singapore so clean and tidy?

A:Because there is a horde of foreign workers doing the cleaning up.

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
Aren't violators caned as well? Singapore was awesome when I visited.
Incredibly clean. Even lower class areas like around Orchard Towers (four
floors of _____) was well above board compared to a clean US City.

~~~
choonway
no they are not caned. instead they are made to put on the high visibility
vests with the words 'Corrective Work Order' and made to pick rubbish. But
they are a rare occurrence. Usually only a composition fine.

------
chiefalchemist
Further proof, the solution to every problem is not more taxes and more
legislation.

------
nintendo1889
You can thank the countries conservative men for that. Chaos v order.

------
tw1010
Insert mandatory "Don't forget that [Country other than the US]'s [positive
traits] comes at a cost of loss of [american value]" here.

What'll it be this time? Communism? Authoritarianism?

~~~
Merrill
When I was in grade school, students took turns cleaning and maintaining the
school. It was also a lesson in democracy, since we had a meeting every month,
run according to regular procedure, where students were elected to the various
jobs such as sweeping the floor, washing the blackboards, cleaning the
erasers, emptying the wastebaskets and burning trash, maintaining the
outhouses, and pumping and bringing in drinking water.

Alas, this is one of the American values we have lost.

------
shahidkarimi
That sort of cleanliness sucks. This is basically a step towards human
extinction from the Earth.

------
franciscop
Except Shibuya, we walked there yesterday after the typhoon and had to avoid
the big rats that normally live in the big trash piles, probably they were
looking for food since yday there was no trash. I've seen similar situation
with crows.

This is a mostly invisible issue for tourists since trash collection happens
in the morning and people take the trash out the night before, so the piles of
trash and animals are visible at night mostly.

And they then enter the convinis (warning, gross rats inside convini):

[https://twitter.com/Ginkai19990324/status/115807601769873408...](https://twitter.com/Ginkai19990324/status/1158076017698734080)

~~~
aikinai
I don’t think putting trash out at night and picking it up early in the
morning is an exception to cleanliness. What else would they do? No one’s
trying to say Japan produces no trash.

~~~
franciscop
But I'm taking about having big trash bags piled on the street for 12+ h
practically everyday. For instance, an easy solution would be to put them only
2-3h before the trash trucks come (I've seen them before the last train at
~11pm, the truck comes at 9am). A cultural-change would be to have big metal
containers to put the trash away so that animals don't have an easy way in.

