Hoh, boy. Anyone who’s been reading my blog for the past month or so will probably be able to guess how I would react to this article in the New York Times (free subscription). It’s an article on trash sorting and collection, and the certainly offending parts include:

Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.

One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: “Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it.”

“I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners’ front doors,” Mr. Taniyama said. …

Shizuka Gu, 53, said that early on, a community leader sent her a letter reprimanding her for not writing her identification number on the bag with a “thick felt-tip pen.” She was chided for using a pen that was “too thin.”

“It was a big shock to be told that I had done something wrong,” Ms. Gu said. “So I couldn’t bring myself to take out the trash here and asked my husband to take it to his office. We did that for one month.” …

One young couple consistently failed to properly sort their trash. “Sorry! We’ll be careful!” they would say each time Mr. Kawai knocked on their door holding evidence of their transgressions.

At last, even Mr. Kawai – a small 77-year-old man with wispy white hair, an easy smile and a demeanor that can only be described as grandfatherly – could take no more.

“They were renting the apartment, so I asked the owner, ‘Well, would it be possible to have them move?’ ” Mr. Kawai said, recalling, with undisguised satisfaction, that the couple was evicted two months ago.

Sorry, but if you ask me, these people are nothing more than nosy little self-important tyrants. Getting people evicted for improper garbage sorting? Shaming people for using a certain type of pen? Makes my own experience with the neighborhood garbage tyrant seem mild in comparison.

But the garbage situation has just been getting worse. When I came here, we had these big bins with covers and could toss out garbage any day we wanted without worrying about smell or animals; it also was easier for the collectors, who had machines to haul the garbage up into the trucks without the collectors getting their hands much dirty. But then the city banned that (though neighboring cities still have it, I’ve noticed), and a few years later, they came up with the famous colored-bag-purchase scheme, essentially a tax that will be raised as time goes on. I shudder to think of the day when this neighborhood, like the one mentioned above, will require us to personally identify ourselves on each bag so as to make it easier for the garbage tyrant to find something wrong and rub our noses in it. I recall that years ago, Tokyo tried to start such a system–require transparent bags and have everyone write their names on each–but that it did not go over well and was dropped.

And there is yet more to annoy one in the article:

In cities, though, not everybody complies, and perhaps more than any other act, sorting out the trash properly is regarded as proof that one is a grown-up, responsible citizen. The young, especially bachelors, are notorious for not sorting. And landlords reluctant to rent to non-Japanese will often explain that foreigners just cannot – or will not – sort their trash.

Now, I know that foreigners will sometimes be this way, but I’m getting tired of the damned stereotyping. I’ll bet that the percentage of non-compliance among foreigners is not much higher than among Japanese–it’s just that we stand out more, and landlords who don’t want foreigners for other reasons just use this as an excuse for discrimination.

In the meantime, this article quote is a strange one:

Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Tokimoto was done. The town had gotten much cleaner with the new garbage policy, he said, though he added: “It’s a bother, but I can’t throw away the trash in the mountains. It would be a violation.”

Why would he mention that? It’s like saying, “I don’t have much money, but I can’t rob a bank–it’d be illegal.” It sounds like a translation error of some kind…. Of course, dumping is unfortunately something that a lot of people are not shy about doing. Having walked a lot of mountain paths in my recent birdwatching, I can attest to how often people drive up these isolated roads and dump loads of trash off steep embankments, making it near-impossible to clean up. What kind of weasel does this? If you’re going to dump garbage, at least be thoughtful enough to dump it where someone can clean it up without a major operation. But then again, people who dump garbage in the first place would be natural-born weasels anyway.

This part of the article, however, seemed to hold a very good idea:

For Yokohama, the goal is to reduce incinerated garbage by 30 percent over the next five years. But Kamikatsu’s goal is even more ambitious: eliminating [burnable] garbage by 2020.

In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.

Hey, if they have that kind of subsidized unit on sale in my neighborhood, I’m getting one. Even if it means sorting more.