One of the things that I don’t miss from my old apartment, which I also mentioned before: the trash service. It would be right out the window, and with only a skimpy net to protect it, crows and cats and other creatures would make a mess out of it at the first opportunity, as you can see from this photo from my last week in Inagi:

As a result, we couldn’t toss our trash until late the night before, or early the same morning the garbage people came. It was a huge inconvenience–if you forgot, you’d have to keep the stinky bags in your apartment until the next trash day, or put them out days early and risk being visited by the garbage nazis for not being a good garbage neighbor.

Here in my new building, the same worries do not apply. There’s a trash complex down in the basement second floor, on my way to my scooter cage, where I can drop off any kind of trash, at any time I like. No birds or other critters can get in there, and you can leave stuff at any time of day or night. Sweet.

The standard burnable/unburnable bags get their own special room, with what may or may not be a compactor unit preparing stuff for easy haul-away. You go into a little room and there are these two biggish metal doors with large handles on them.

You open a door, put the bag in, and close it again. Some big noises follow, and your trash is somehow taken care of.

We’ve already had one hiccup in the building; the burnable trash door was out of service a few days ago, causing everyone to pile trash up at the room’s entrance. The next day, a notice was up telling people not to put in bags bigger than a certain size; apparently someone had gotten too ambitious and had jammed up the system.

For everything else, you use the special trash room next door to the plain garbage room.

Here, you’ve got your PET bottles with space underneath for cardboard…

More space for glass bottles, cans, and newspapers & books underneath…

And then in the corner, places for old clothes, milk cartons, and styrofoam trays.

There is also a place for unburnable garbage too big to fit in the regular trash room door, as well as for sodai-gomi–but so far no one is bothering with sodai-gomi stickers. People seem to be throwing out whatever stuff they thought they could fit but couldn’t. A nice, big sofa was there the other day, and disappeared fast. A washer-dryer unit is still down there, probably too big or otherwise problematic for these units. Someone threw out a satellite TV dish, apparently unaware that they are prohibited in this building.

What’s also interesting is that the special trash room is locked–requiring you to wave your key in front of the ping-pong-ball receptor, just like with the front door or bicycle room.

What’s more interesting is that you also have to use the key in order to get back out of the room–I guess people could access the place by coming in where the trash collectors enter.

They don’t have trash chutes here like you see in some U.S. movies for tall apartment buildings, but for Japan, it’s a very nice system.