The Clean Center

I could kick myself for not bringing a camera on today's adventure. Who knew that going to the dump would be such an experience. When I returned to Japan from my American sojourn, I began sorting through the piles of stuff that had accumulated under the deck, in the barn, in the rafters and around the house and created a new pile - "garbage". Unfortunately, with all the strict recycling rules, certain things cannot be disposed of on garbage day. People inevitably end up disposing of these "non-allowed" items by throwing them on the riverbank in the middle of the night, burying them in deep holes at the end of their fields, leaving them in heaps around their barns or hiring someone else to haul them off. I begged my husband to figure out a way to get rid of the rubbish before the mice settled in the piles for winter.

First, he had to go to the town hall to get an official permission paper to allow us to enter the "Clean Center". At the town hall, he had to show his driver's license to get a crisp white paper with an official red stamp on it declaring that he indeed did have his domicile in Jonan. Why couldn't the official person at the dump check his driver's license and save the world one more piece of official paper? Who knows. Certainly, the Clean Center would not want impostors or outsiders paying a fee to dump their garbage. Clearly they want to keep this multi-million dollar facility strictly for the less than 20,000 people who live here.

Next, we take this official document up the hill to the new (within the past 6 years) "Clean Center". The Center is only open 9-5 on workdays, no holidays or weekends and it is closed for lunch. It is easier to go to the dentist than dump the trash. The grand entrance looks like you might be entering an amusement park - the winding smoothly paved road is lined with whimsically pruned trees and bright novelty flowers. At the top of the hill stands a gleaming building with two tall pink smoke stacks that emit rainbows I guess, because we didn't see any smoke. It was so clean that I was afraid maybe we had entered a hospital parking lot rather than the city dump. We pull up to the little booth where an official city worker, in uniform, greets us and inspects our freshly stamped document. With his approval, we are given a card to put into a machine that will record the weight of our vehicle. When the sound beeps and the green light bleeps, we proceed forward to a great metal door that slowly opens as our truck approaches and we enter the vault. Inside, there are four more doors, labeled with big numbers, that lead to the super efficient burners that will incinerate our burnables. Two aproned and gloved attendants scurry to our vehicle and usher us to door number four. It was almost like a game show - I was quite thrilled. We empty the contents of our bags and boxes onto a great tray and the attendants rifle through our garbage, making sure that everything there is actually burnable. There is something disconcerting about sharing all of your trash with other people - they get such an intimate view of your life. We passed the test. They bowed as we left and once we were gone, they would push the button and cremate our trash. I'm so glad they spared me from watching our dearly departed trash burn. It was almost ceremonious.

We drove out of this building to the next gleaming entrance, where non-burnable trash is accepted. This was a lively place. We were the only vehicle but there were 4 attendants in snappy uniforms and shining safety helmets who rushed over to inspect our goods. You would think they would refrain from commenting on people's garbage but they made little remarks about what that was or what this was. (I so wanted to say that - yeah, that's a broken vibrator, wore it out- but I refrained.) We were able to dispose of most of it but they could not take broken roof tiles, shingles, broken concrete blocks or plaster board. We had to make several more inquiries before we found a place that would allow us to dump the roof tiles and concrete but we have yet to find a place that will accept the asphalt shingles or plaster board.

This "Clean Center," proof of the millions of tax dollars that our community has paid, is the same center used by the recycling trucks that pick up our garbage from the village on recycling days. Oddly, in the village, we are not allowed to recycle empty paint cans or unwashed PET bottles but the Center gladly accepts them. If it all ends up in the same place, why can't we just dispose of them on the regular pick-up day rather than make a special trip with an official paper and pay an additional fee (oh yeah, it wasn't free). Who knows.

The second place was on top of another nearby mountain and it was freakin' scary. My husband had to fill out all this paperwork, including a short essay on why he wanted to dump the broken roof tiles. How does one answer why they want to get rid of broken useless materials? All this paperwork gets submitted to the Prefecture (the state level) where they can keep track of who is dumping what, just in case something suspicious happens. How they would know who dumped what, I don't know. We didn't write our name on anything. We live on an island - I mean, it's not like people from another country would come over here and illegally dump. Who else could dump anything here except for the fools who live here? He filled out the forms, which are in triplicate on three different colors and paid for the government stamp that makes them official. We were finally sent down down down a dusty, narrow, very scary road into the bowels of the mountain. This used to be a quarry for mountain soil and construction stone and now the void is being filled with broken tiles and concrete blocks and pipes. There were crows soaring over the broken remains of so many homes. It was like a graveyard of rooftops and walls. I'm glad the sun was bright, had it been overcast or dark, this place would have been terrifying. We quickly dumped our stuff and paid the guy $20 for the privilege. We still have a box full of wet dirty plasterboard bits and shingles that we can't dispose of. My husband says we can just bury it somewhere because private citizens are not permitted to dump construction waste, or we could give it to a construction person and have them haul it off. I'm just relieved that the yard looks a bit cleaner and that we have eliminated some nesting grounds for varmints. I wasn't motivated to do much else- this seemed to take up most of the day and it was way too much excitement for me!