Garbage everywhere

My living room is filled with papers.  Seriously.  Everywhere we go, we get paper.  My husband registered with the city and came home with a huge packet of information about the city.  There are manuals from all the new appliances.  We went shopping for kitchen cabinets and came home with a ton of papers with different options.  There is the gas and electric company new tenant paperwork telling us the meter readings and how to pay our bills.  There are a couple coloring books because  my son needs something to occupy himself sometimes.  My husband has picked up the local newspaper.  And more.  So much more. 

After writing this blog, I will go around and pick up all the paper and put it into a stack.  But I cannot deal with the papers.  I cannot go through it and purge, because I have no idea what each piece of paper says.  I don't know if it is important or if it can be tossed.  This is a new responsibility for my husband and I can guarantee it will drive him nuts.  But for now, he will just have to go through all of it and decide - keep or toss.

The tossing is my responsibility.  The garbage system in Japan is quite complex.  You must sort everything into specific categories.  Each category goes into a different bag and gets picked up on different days.  The whole thing is pretty convoluted.  Also each city has their own system.  For example, in Osaka, where I lived 15 years ago, we had different colored bags for each category with helpful pictures on the bag.  Here we use the same plain clear plastic bag for everything.  On the one hand it is nice because you don't have a ton of brown bags that haven't been used, but are constantly out of blue bags.  On the other hand it is confusing because you have to look inside to see what is in the bag before putting something in it (because we don't have our own system figured out).  We have already purchased 2 garbage cans for the kitchen for the two most used categories: combustibles and plastic recycling.  But what about all the bags that only get picked up once a month?  What do I do with those?  What do other people do?

I missed combustibles garbage pick up today, so I will have to wait until next week.  It isn't a big deal because we aren't cooking right now, but I should have been more on the ball.  Garbage pickup is super important.  You want it out of your house as soon as possible.  Otherwise the plastic bags begin to take over.  Luckily, the stinky garbage (combustibles) is picked up twice a week, so I just have to wait until Tuesday.

When my husband was introducing us to our new neighbors he mentioned that we were from the US (him for the past 13 years and our son and me a lifetime) and I didn't speak Japanese.  One of the neighbors asked, "Does she know how to manage the garbage here?"  At first that seems like a strange question, but I get it.  It's pretty complicated, especially for someone who can't read/understand Japanese.

Tonight I must prepare the plastic recycling.  Not the plastic water bottles though, those are on a different day.