lesson on trash sorting? (ゴミ分け）

[sweetneet]

hi,
since i've only been subscribing to this podcast for a few weeks now, I'm not sure if this has been covered already...but I think that a good suggestion for a lesson is an intro to the trash sorting system in Japan. I remember when I did my summer internship in Japan a couple years ago, the thing that freaked me out THE MOST when I first arrived to my dorm was figuring out trash-sorting system! The thing was, the instructions in my dorm for sorting the trash were available in Japanese only (I was in a suburb of Osaka, so English was not as prevalent as it was in Tokyo area). Even though I had taken 2 years of Japanese classes, it wasn't enough to fully understand all the instructions (I even took a picture: http://web.mit.edu/~anita7/www/MiscJapa ... photo5.jpg ). I tried using a dictionary to decipher it, but made too many mistakes...too many times I took the wrong trash out on the wrong day, or ended up mis-classifying something! Doh!!

Well, it took me a while to get used to the whole sorting trash idea, since in the US it's pretty simple (you just recycle paper & aluminum, and just throw out everything else together). But in Japan since you have categorize stuff into burnable, non-burnable, plastic, paper, etc, it is a lot more complicated (even native Japanese people have told me it is sometimes confusing for them). I know that sometimes the "trash category" is written on items themselves (i.e. it will say プラ on a plastic container) but if it consists of multiple parts, it may be confusing if your vocab and/or kanji isn't that great (i.e. should know what 袋, 包装紙 etc mean).

[seanolan]

One problem is that trash sorting is different from town to town. My town sorts into 6 different classifications (burnable, plastic, PET bottles, aluminum, glass, and non-burnable), but just 10 kilometers from me, they sort into 3 (burnable, PET bottles, and non-burnable). About 20 kilometers in a different direction, they have even more classifications (burnable is sorted from wet {organic, food, etc} and dry {wood, paper, etc}, glass from colored and clear). And different towns have different definitions of what qualifies as what. It's not even a language issue so much as a cultural issue. I think the vocabulary necessary to understand all the permutations of garbage sorting would take many lessons.

I will agree with you though that it is a nightmare for a gaijin to figure out, especially with limited Japanese skills.

Sean

[Bueller_007]

Sean is right.

I've lived in three different places in Osaka, and each one had a different scheme:
1) burnable/non-burnable
2) six different kinds of crap (but i was so accustomed to burnable/non-burnable that I just said the hell with it and threw everything in one bag)
3) don't worry about it because we pay a guy to sort through your trash (my apartment's policy, not the city's)

[annie]

I lived somewhere in Chiba where everything was burnable, except for metal.
(even PET bottles were to be thrown into burnable, if it was too inconvenient for you to take them to the designated pickup location).

Now I have more categories than I can even wrap my mind around, a 100-page booklet that tells me what to do with anything (if you can think of the word for it at least).

I'm supposed to drag my styrofoam and milk containers to the grocery (the nearest of which is only open from 10am-7pm). But it's the recyclable plastic that's really mendokusai... you're supposed to wash out everything (like from the wasabi packet that you get with your takeout sushi and the ready-made curry/pasta sauce things).

Not that I'd advise taking your trash to the nearest 7-11, but I debate the morality of it at least weekly.