Gomi Patrol: Ve must have ordaa!!

[Samurai_Jerk]

I've always heard stories about the obaasan garbage patrol giving people shit for not disposing of their garbage properly. However, in my three years in Japan I never even bothered to find out when I was supposed to put what out. I just threw out my garbage whenever I felt like it and never seperated anything. It seemed like all of my Japanese neighbors did the same. No one ever bothered me about it. Did I live in the only place in Japan where it nobody gave a fuck?

[kotatsuneko]

sounds like it, the only other place that offer a sanctuary are "mansions"

our rubbish bloke owned the house next to us and was a right little hitler, he even had like a telescope and night light to spy on offendors, along with his own stationary to pen hate mail to those who crossed his path

[omae mona]

sounds like it, the only other place that offer a sanctuary are "mansions"

or at least good mansions. Here in our cardboard & duct tape mansion, everybody gets regular nastygrams from the building management warning that next time, they ARE going to dust for fingerprints, etc., and find out who mixed their trash. Thank goodness there is also a Korean family (possibly even lower than me on the gaijin food chain) in the building, because otherwise you can be sure the landlord would be banging on my door, waving somebody else's PET bottles & newspapers at me.

[dimwit]

Some neighbourhoods in Matsuyama, not mine think God, require their citizenry to put name tags on their garbage.

By the way, I often see little old men (I call them the garbage elves) picking through and carrying off the cans and bottles and newspapers the night before recycling day. Any clues as to what that is about?

[American Oyaji]

They are taking the steel and aluminum cans to a gomiyasan to sell.

Or sometimes they sell it too a steel or aluminum recycling company themselves.