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I was recently asked what three things I miss most about the States. Without missing a beat, I replied: the Interstate, Barnes and Noble, and garbage cans in almost every corner. The first two, I think, are obvious. First, the narrow expressways in Japan are hardly sufficient to accommodate the thick workaday traffic. Second, bookstores here, if ever they sold English books, sell them mostly in paperbacks and are often twice as much as the US price. The traffic inconvenience I could alleviate by taking the ever-efficient densha (train), or for longer trips, the shinkansen. The books I could order online or settle for second-rate English bookstores in Kanda. But the garbage cans, when you readily need them, you have to detour to a public bathroom and hope for at least the tiny metal boxes that hide behind the toilet. Or worst stll, you have to take garbage home with you - something that I've learned to do.

I'd like to know where the Japanese hide their garbage cans? Is the sight of it so aesthetically offensive to the fastidious Japanese that setting it out visibly for its utilitarian purpose is still questionable? Unless you're in a public place like a park or a zoo - where, if you looked hard enough, you could spot a garbage can in an inconspicuous place - finding a readily available garbage can is like asking for the moon. What bothers me is the fact that public places, e.g. the subways, are fairly clean and litter-free except maybe for stray candy wrappers or discarded soda cans. Do the Japanese have a special pocket in their bags where they deposit bits and pieces of accumulated trash or are there receptacles hidden in the back alleyways that I don't know about?

Once while walking through the side streets of Tachikawa, we bought a couple of sticks of yakitori that we ate while waiting for the signals to turn at a crowded pedestrian corner. Holding on to our empty sticks, we crossed the station and entered the Grand Lumiere, keeping our eyes open for garbage cans. I was certain we'd find garbage cans in the mall: "There should be one at the corner between the escalators," I told my companion. Wrong. We climbed the escalators up to the 7th floor to Chinatown and still no garbage can. We snacked on red bean-cakes and sesame-balls and ended up with more trash. Hopelessly, I stuffed everything inside my purse: a scrunched plastic bag and yakitori sticks now sat alongside my foil-encased used gum and wads of tissue papers.

Every time I get ready for a trip outdoors, I make sure I have my pocket-size tissues, my JR map, and my handy sheet of "Useful Japanese Words and Phrases", I can count on finding bits and pieces of trash in my purse-used toothpicks from samplings of pickled vegetables at the grocery stores, yakitori sticks, rubber bands, Soft Cream wrappers, coffee stirrers, empty sugar packs, the list grows. It's a surprise every time I open my bag; not like finding a hundred-bill in a coat pocket, but more like finding something moldy in the fridge.

Many thanks to Yen B for this Rant.