Arab News Japan

TOKYO: At the recent FIFA World Cup in Qatar, football fans were impressed with how Japanese supporters obsessively cleaned all the rubbish from the stadiums in the areas where they were watching the games.

Japanese are quite strict about how they dispose of rubbish in their own country, but now some are saying the rules have gone too far.

The Mainichi newspaper reports that a municipal rule requiring people to write their names on the garbage bags they put out for collection has raised privacy concerns.

In most areas, rubbish must be put out at certain times on certain days in municipality-specified bags. If you put rubbish in the wrong bag, the refuse collectors will leave the bag at the pick-up point with a warning notice on it, but without identification, it’s hard to find out whose rubbish it is.

Most Japanese will be horrified that they have made a mistake and recover their bags by themselves, but some municipalities want citizens to put their names on the rubbish bags to identify those who made a mistake.

“I don’t like having to write my name on my garbage bag – it’s as if someone is peering into my life,” a female resident of Ichikikushikino, Kagoshima Prefecture, said. No name now means no collection and bags are left at the pick-up point, effectively shaming their owners.

The city government says it hopes that the requirement will encourage people to properly separate and dispose of their garbage.

It says there have been cases where people place gas canisters and batteries in non-burnable garbage, causing fires at the processing facility. If a person’s name is not on the trash bag or if the rubbish is not sorted properly, the bag is slapped with a sticker specifying the violation.

Osaki in Kagoshima Prefecture also has the name rule and it had the highest recycling rate in fiscal 2020.

Major cities Osaka and Yokohama, as well as Tokyo’s 23 wards don’t even have designated rubbish bags, and people can simply dispose of rubbish in plastic shopping bags, or transparent or semitransparent bags.

The Ministry of the Environment states that it is not aware of the number of municipalities that require residents to write their names on their garbage bags. An official commented, “There are privacy and other concerns, so the government doesn’t promote the practice.”