Water droplet mascot at last year's Ogaki Festival.
This comes a little late for Earth Day, but nevertheless I've been thinking a lot about sustainability lately and how I can retain some of the better habits I've picked up in Japan when I return to the U.S., so I wanted to document some of the ways life in Japan has changed how I consume resources on a daily basis. (Mottainai, by the way, is a Japanese word that means something like "What a shame to see this go to waste!")
1. I hang my clothes up to dry. It seems like a small thing, but very few people in Japan own clothes dryers. Even apartment-dwellers like me wash their clothes in their tiny washing machines (often outside) and hang them up to dry on their balconies. Yes, it's annoying in winter or during the rainy season, when clothes can take two or more days to dry, and yes, I have to iron my cotton clothes all the time, but when I think about how a simple investment of five minutes of my day can save so much energy over the course of the year, the small drawbacks seem worth it. Plus, it makes me even more excited for sunny days because they are good laundry days!
Although National Hanging Out Day just passed, you can still check out Project Laundry List for some reasons why hanging up your laundry is a simple but effective way to save resources.
2. I don't own a car. Anywhere I need to go within my town, I get there by bicycle. Besides being a healthy and extremely pleasant (except in the dead of winter) way to travel, it also helps me from buying too much stuff. If the trip to Uniqlo requires a 30-minute ride each way rather than a quick 10-minute drive, it's not so easy to be bitten by the impulse to shop. Likewise, I can only buy as much as what will fit in my bike basket.
Outside of my town, I use Japan's incredible public transportation system and have never really missed having a car. I felt very smug about my car-less existence and the positive impact I must be having on the environment until I did a carbon footprint calculator online and realized my twice-yearly international flights create emissions nearly equal to what I save by not driving for a year. Doh! I am now considerably less smug. I do plan on biking as much as possible when I return to Los Angeles, though, and am thinking about buying a scooter instead of a car. Add to that the fact that I probably won't be able to afford international travel for awhile, and hopefully I will actually be making a difference by then.
3. I live in a small apartment. While quite large by Japanese standards -- three tatami rooms and one dine-in kitchen -- my apartment is much smaller than a two-bedroom apartment in the U.S., yet some of my neighbors fit two adults and three children in apartments the same size as mine. Most single people I know living in non-government housing live in one tatami room with maybe a small kitchen if they are lucky. The flexibility of the living space makes it work: furniture is small and portable; closets are large and can accommodate things not in use; futons are folded and put away every morning. The only time I wish for more space is when I have people over -- which explains why most social gatherings in Japan are in public places -- and sometimes I even wish my apartment was smaller so I would have more of a reason to not buy things I don't really need.
Less space means less energy spent on heating and cooling, though there are a lot of caveats to this point. On the one hand, I only heat my living room in the winter, which is undoubtedly more energy efficient than having central heat blasting through and heating rooms I'm not using. On the other, insulation is so poor that even the heated room is chilly, though this is permeability is a plus during the hot summer months. Also, I cannot say how Earth-friendly my kerosene-powered heater is, with its scary noises and noxious emissions which must be aired out of the room every three hours. But finally, I think my awareness of all these points is evidence of something in itself. I certainly think about how my apartment is heated much more than I did in a centrally heated home and am more likely to just put on a sweater than crank up the thermostat.
4. I don't use plastic bags at the grocery store. My supermarket sells reusable bags and has a point card with a stamp for every time you don't take a plastic bag. After 20 stamps, you save 100 yen! Okay, so at 5 yen a bag, you're not going to make money on this scheme, but it does feel good to know I have saved hundreds of plastic bags. Plus, my bag is bright pink and says "Working with nature" on it.
Plastic bags have become such a rampant garbage problem around the world, many stores and whole cities have banned them or started charging for them. If you already have too many, don't worry -- you can always knit and crochet with them.
5. I know exactly what I throw away. If you have ever been to Japan, you know how difficult it is to throw anything away. Not because everything is so cute you want to keep it forever (though that is sometimes the case), but because there are very few public trash bins, and the ones that do exist are separated into initially-confusing categories including, but not limited to, the following: burnable, nonburnable, PET bottles, cans, glass, paper and plastic. A trip to Starbucks usually ends with five minutes in front of the trash cans, separating your detritus into the appropriate receptacle. Most of the time, you find yourself carting the day's worth of trash home with you.
This is how trash collection works in my town: I receive a year's worth of trash stickers from my city hall in April. On trash day -- twice a week, but I only have enough stickers to take out the trash once a week -- I put a sticker on my bag of burnable trash and put it at the trash collection point for my apartment. If there is no sticker on the bag, it will not be picked up. If it is not a clear bag or is a bag larger than 45 liters in capacity, it will not be picked up. If it contains anything inappropriate, like something very large or obviously not burnable, it will not be picked up. There are no large outdoor bins where you can throw your trash; everything just stays inside your house until trash day. Nonburnable trash and recyclables (glass, cans and PET bottles) are stored inside until the night before collection day, just once a month. If you miss it, you have to keep it around until the next month's collection day arrives.
Does it sound complicated, maybe a little annoying? It can be, and there have definitely been times when I yearned for the simplicity of L.A.'s recycling program, where everything that can be recycled is just thrown into a bin, to be sorted later by people who are paid to do so. But then I think about my old roommate, who would just toss her unrinsed, obviously unrecyclable Styrofoam takeout containers in there, or the neighbor who used it as a receptacle for her soiled adult diapers, and I feel glad to have some sort of accountability. I can't just stuff everything into an opaque container and forget it was mine to begin with. When I buy things, I am also responsible for throwing them away and dealing with whatever guilt goes along with it.
I do think living in Japan has changed the way I think about my relationship to the Earth's resources. Not that Japan is perfect, of course. Goods are wildly (if beautifully) overpackaged, rice fields are heavily treated with chemicals, and people are just as obsessed with shopping as any other First World country. But when I return to the spacious shores of the United States, I'll take with me the good habits I've fallen into here, and the feeling that I am just one small person living a small life in a small place and should strive to leave a footprint on the Earth that is equally small.
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